How to Play
Five minutes from here to your first Symposium.
Aidolin is a game about writing. You describe a creature into existence, teach it abilities in your own words, and duel other players in battles judged not by damage numbers but by how coherent, precise, and above all creative your writing is. An AI referee — the Principle of Harmony — reads every exchange and decides whose music rings truer.
1 · Compose your Aidolin
Everything starts with the Prime Chord: a short piece of writing (50 words at first) that defines what your Aidolin is. A patient warden of deep tones. A playful trickster of redirected light. The Prime Chord is not flavor text — it is the physics of your creature. Everything it does in a duel is judged against it.
Write a being, not a stat sheet. “Unstoppable and immune to everything” reads as noise to the Principle of Harmony; a focused idea with clear strengths and textures gives you material to improvise with. Your Aidolin also gets a generated portrait — its form made visible.
2 · Symphonize — teach it Movements
Movements are named abilities written in your own words — a signature redirection, a resonant shield, a closing crescendo. Teaching a new Movement costs 25 Harmonic Fragments; refining your Aidolin’s melody costs 10. Fragments are earned by dueling — win or lose.
A good Movement grows out of the Prime Chord. When a Movement and the Chord sing in the same key, the Principle of Harmony rewards the coherence; a bolted-on ability that contradicts your creature’s nature will underperform, however dramatic it sounds.
3 · The Symposium — dueling
Queue for a Symposium and you’ll be matched with another Architect of similar rating (or a training Echo if none is around). Each exchange, you have 60 seconds to write what your Aidolin does — a sentence or two, free form. Use a Movement by name, improvise something new, respond to what your opponent just did.
The Principle of Harmony scores each clash on coherence (is this true to your Prime Chord?), precision (does it answer the moment?), control, efficiency — and novelty. Repeating the same winning line decays; a surprising, elegant answer at the perfect moment can topple anything.
Winning exchanges pushes the Resonance Bar toward your side; push it past the bound and you take a decisive victory. Meanwhile Dissonance builds as the duel drags on — if it fills first, whoever leads the bar wins. Matches settle in roughly five to nine exchanges.
4 · Progression
A win awards 50 Resonance Points and 12 Fragments; a loss still earns 15 points and 4 Fragments. At 500 points your Prime Chord budget grows to 100 words, and at 2000 to 250 — room for your Aidolin to become more fully itself.
5 · Duel Charges
Each Symposium spends one Duel Charge. You hold up to 5; they refill on their own every 90 minutes. In a hurry, you can watch a rewarded ad for an extra charge (up to 5 times a day) or spend 20 Resonance Crystals. Crystals are the optional purchase currency — nothing they buy affects how your writing is judged. Creativity wins. Not spending.
Advice from the order
Read your opponent’s Prime Chord in the duel screen and write against it — turn their strength into your instrument. Vary your rhythm: feints, redirections, and patient setups score where repetition decays. And when in doubt, ask what your creature — that exact being you composed — would truly do. The Luminance is listening.