The Covenant
A trading card game drawn from scripture.
Collect the faithful, build your deck, and contend for the covenant.
What this is
The Covenant is a mobile-first collectible card battler. It borrows its screen
architecture and interaction feel from Pokémon TCG Pocket — a tap-to-enter
splash, a home hub built around a booster-pack carousel, two free packs a day on
a timer, a card binder, a deck builder, and fast head-to-head matches — and
applies it to characters, events and imagery from the Bible.
It ships as an installable PWA: open it in a phone browser, add it to the home
screen, and it launches full-screen with its own icon and works offline.
Running it
npm install
npm run dev # http://localhost:5173
| Script | Does |
|---|
npm run dev | Dev server with hot reload |
npm run build | Typecheck, then production build to dist/ |
npm run preview | Serve the production build locally |
npm test | Run the engine and economy test suites |
npm run typecheck | Typecheck without emitting |
How the game plays
Two players, 20-card decks, first to 3 points wins.
- A coin flip decides who goes first. Heads you, tails the opponent.
- Both draw 5. The deck reshuffles until your opening hand holds at least one
Basic Figure, so there is no mulligan penalty.
- You place one Basic Figure in the Active slot and up to 3 on the Bench.
- The player going first gets no energy and cannot attack on turn 1 — they
trade tempo for board position, and are first to Ascend on round 2. The player
going second gets energy immediately and can attack straight away.
- Knocking out a Figure scores 1 point. Knocking out an Anointed scores 2.
Energy is not a card. Each deck declares one or two of the six types — Light,
Fire, Water, Earth, Spirit, Shadow — and the Altar supplies one per turn.
Figures Ascend rather than evolve. Some ascensions are a calling, where God
renames the same person (Abram → Abraham, Simon → Peter, Jacob → Israel); others
are a lineage, passing the promise down a generation (Abraham → Isaac → Jacob).
The full ruleset, including every tunable number, is in
docs/RULES.md.
Repository layout
public/art/cards/ Card artwork, one webp per card id — drop-in, see docs/ART.md
public/art/key/ Key art used by the splash
public/fonts/ Self-hosted Cinzel + Inter, so the PWA renders offline
scripts/ Art import pipeline
src/styles/ Design tokens — every colour, radius and shadow in the game
src/art/ Card back, energy orbs, rarity marks, pack wrappers, icons (SVG)
src/components/ The card frame and the shared neumorphic UI kit
src/data/ Card pool, pack definitions, story content
src/engine/ The rules engine: pure TypeScript, no React, fully tested
src/store/ Persisted player state — collection, economy, decks, progress
src/screens/ One file per screen
The engine is deliberately isolated. src/engine/ is a reducer over an
immutable MatchState driven by a seeded RNG; it imports nothing from React and
touches no DOM. That keeps the rules unit-testable, makes matches deterministic
and replayable from a seed, and means the same code could run server-side if
online play is ever added. The battle screen only dispatches actions and renders
state.
Artwork
Five cards ship with finished art. Every other card renders in the same
code-drawn frame with a typographic placeholder, and becomes a finished card the
moment real art is dropped in — no code change required. See
docs/ART.md for the contract and the import script.
Credits
Card artwork and the Covenant key art are provided by the project owner. Cinzel
and Inter are licensed under the SIL Open Font License.
