How to play
A Broadcast, start to finish
Eight players, one building, and a set of rules both sides can read.
Match flow
Six phases
Phase 1
Wake and orient
Five Prey start in separate housing locations with walkie-talkies. Hunters start elsewhere. Power is low and unreliable, and nobody knows the building yet.
Phase 2
Investigate
Prey search, learn routes and share what they find. Hunters patrol, chase down noise, and go after the resources that bring the lights back.
Phase 3
Commit or deceive
Prey push a viable escape chain, or make noise at one that is not. Hunters decide whether to answer the activity or tighten control of the building.
Phase 4
Capture and rescue
A captured player is carried to a cell. The team can recover restricted access and let them out, if they are willing to come back for them.
Phase 5
Escalate
Restored sectors hand the Hunters real control. Execution preparations put permanent elimination on the table for the first time.
Phase 6
Resolve
The night ends on a hard time limit, so no one can hold a match hostage. Anyone still running gets to finish their attempt.
Systems
What you are actually doing
Sound is the whole game
Movement, searching, doors, climbing, crawling, repairs, barricades, breaking things and equipment all make their own noise.
Not everything is audible everywhere. Quiet actions stay worth doing, and knowing what a sound means is a skill that belongs to the player, not the character.
Walkie-talkies
Everyone carries one, which is what makes splitting up survivable. Route information is worth more than any item in the building.
It is also a channel someone else can listen to.
Defending yourself
Prey can stun, interrupt, distract and buy distance. That is the ceiling.
No Prey wins a sustained head-on fight, and no group of Prey gets to surround a Hunter and keep them down.
Capture and rescue
Hunters carry captured Prey to cells in the housing wings or the front holding area. Capture is not death.
The rescue key sits behind a protected gate and needs a found keycard, a combination, or an equivalent access objective. Rescue costs risk and teamwork, and never requires one specific character.
Executions
The prison has an electric-chair suite near solitary and an IV room in medical, both rebuilt by The Host over large sacrificial seals.
Making one work takes three steps: restore power to that sector, retrieve a ritual component, and complete activation at a protected control point. Only then can a Hunter bring someone to it.
There is a readable warning and a real window to intervene before anyone is permanently gone.
Fuses and power
Fuses are shared physical resources. Hunters use them to restore sectors; Prey use them to power doors and access mechanisms. A Hunter can take a fuse off a captured Prey.
Once a fuse is installed it cannot be pulled back out. Every one you spend is a decision you do not get to revisit.
The warden's computer
A restricted terminal that gives Prey surveillance and lighting control. It will not hand you every exit at once.
A specialist can arm a delayed lighting shutdown and be somewhere else when the building goes dark.
Hiding and searching
Lockers, closets, beds and other authored spaces around the prison. Hiding conceals you; it does not protect you. A Hunter who suspects a space can search it.
Getting in fast is louder than getting in carefully, which makes the last second before a Hunter rounds the corner a real decision.