How to Play Wireburn in One Round

You can teach Wireburn in the time it takes to deal. The first live round does the rest.

Setup

Shuffle the 59-card deck. Deal 9 cards each for 2-6 players. Put the three dock markers out: Teal, Purple, Orange. Docks start empty. Youngest player opens.

The core move

On your turn you may open one new empty dock. After that, play as many legal cards as you can onto open docks.

A card is legal if it matches the top of that dock by the same colour, one value higher or one value lower, or by the same number on any colour. An empty dock opens with a card of that dock’s colour, or with a NULL.

Grey plays as a number of any colour. A Grey on top opens the dock to every colour. Plus and minus cards attach to a number and shift that value by 1. Plus and minus together cancel and discard. That cancel still counts as a play. Keep the two ideas apart: matching one higher or one lower is the basic rule. The plus and minus cards are a separate shift.

If you cannot play

Draw up to 3 cards, one at a time. A drawn card you can play may go down immediately, and that ends the draw. After 3 dead draws, pass. Once you have played a card this turn you cannot draw.

Damage

Attack cards add to your damage counter during the turn. The pile hits the next player when the turn ends. They draw that many cards. They only skip a turn if they were next to play. Otherwise they draw and stay in the order.

How a game ends

Play your last card and announce SYSTEM CLEAR. You are now on Final Firewall. You must live through one full round with an empty hand. If the turn comes back and you are still empty, you win. If you take a hit while exposed, you draw, you skip, and you come back in with a hand.

Hold a NULL when that hit lands and you can push the damage onto a dock instead.

Read it once. Then play a round. The docks teach faster than a paragraph.