Об игре
Ground Truth is a two-player adversarial card game set in the world of emergency management. One player takes the role of the Emergency Manager, responsible for containing an unfolding disaster. The other player controls the Hazard itself - not as a passive scenario deck, but as an active opponent with their own resources, strategy, and objectives. The game includes two hazard modules: Wildfire, a fast-moving terrain-driven threat with aerial assets and containment mechanics, and Pandemic, a slower-building dual-threat module tracking both Case Load and Misinformation simultaneously.
The Emergency Manager manages two resources: Staffing, a personnel pool that depletes as cards are played and does not automatically reset between rounds, and Activation, a per-round action limit that represents real operational bandwidth constraints. The Hazard player manages a single resource - Intensity - which builds automatically at the start of every round whether the Hazard player acts or not. This passive growth is central to the game's tension: delay always benefits the Hazard and never benefits the EM player. Each round follows five phases - Intensity build, Hazard play, EM response, impact assessment, and Staffing recovery - during which both players make decisions that accumulate on a built-in Round Tracker.
The Round Tracker is a core component, not an optional record-keeping tool. Both players log six fields every round: Intensity at open, Staffing at open, cards played, unaddressed hazards and the reason they were not addressed, Community Impact delta, and Staffing at close. The Unaddressed Hazards column is the mechanical heart of the game's after-action review function - it forces explicit acknowledgment of every prioritization decision made under resource constraint.
The Emergency Manager wins by keeping Community Impact below 20 when Round 12 ends. The Hazard player wins by pushing Community Impact above 20 before Round 12 ends. Three outcome tiers are possible: Contained (EM player wins), Degraded (partial loss - the most common realistic outcome), and Overwhelmed (Hazard player wins, game ends immediately). A contained outcome with depleted Staffing and collapsed Public Confidence is scored differently than a contained outcome with reserves intact. At game end, the Round Tracker becomes the after-action review document, providing a causal record of every decision made and every threat consciously ignored across all twelve rounds.
-description from the designer