Tyrants of the Underdark

On your turn your hands play your entire 5-card hand at once, summing two pools printed on every card: Influence (purple, the buy resource) and Power (red, the fight resource). You then spend those pools, in any order, on a menu of seven actions — recruit a market card with Influence, deploy/move troops on the Underdark map with Power, assassinate enemy troops, or *promote* a card from hand or discard to permanently remove it from your deck for endgame VP. Discard the whole hand, draw 5 fresh, pass.

Setup: build the 80-card market by shuffling two 40-card half-decks (Drow, Houses, Demons, Elemental Evil, Aberrations, Undead). Turn: play hand of 5, sum Influence and Power pools, then spend across recruit/deploy/move/assassinate/promote/aspect-ability/place-noble-token. Recruited cards go to discard; assassinated troops go to your Trophy Hall. Promote permanently exiles a card from your circulation, scoring its printed inner-circle VP (1-4) at game end. Endgame triggers when any half-deck pile in the market exhausts, a player places their last troop, or the market deck runs out. Score = sites controlled + city VP tokens + cards in deck (1 each) + cards promoted (printed VP) + trophies (2 VP per assassinated troop) + total-control bonuses.

Each turn you partition a single hand of 5 across two non-fungible economies that share no conversion rate: Power for board presence and aggression, Influence for engine growth. The choice space at a typical hand is 8-15 reasonable splits because every action — recruit, deploy, assassinate, promote — competes for the same two pools. The signature tradeoff is spite-vs-economy: 4 Power can deploy onto a contested site (your VP up) or assassinate the leader's troop (their VP down, your trophies up). Strong moves weave the promote and assassinate VP tracks rather than committing to one.

Dominant skills are dual-resource budgeting (how to split a 6-Influence/4-Power hand across multiple actions) and threat assessment (which rival is closest to triggering endgame, and via which trigger). Strong players exploit promote as a primary VP engine rather than a trash mechanic, time their assassinations against Trophy Hall thresholds, and read half-deck pairings (Drow+Demons is a knife fight, Drow+Elemental is an engine race). Memory matters — the market is open but deck composition isn't; tracking your own promote queue separates intermediate from advanced.

You are a Drow matron mother in the Forgotten Realms Underdark — recruit minions, deploy troops across a graph of dark cities, and assassinate rivals to claim territory below the Sword Coast.

Forgotten Realms cavern aesthetic — deep violets and obsidian blacks on the board, glowing faerzress mushroom-light, drow purple-grey skin tones on card portraits, demonic crimson accents. Card art credited to multiple WotC fantasy illustrators in painted-realist style. Recognizably D&D — same visual genus as a Magic: the Gathering set, distinct from Eurogame illustration.