How it works

Gals is a magazine you collect. You open packs of pages, assemble issues, and play the pages you are proudest of against other people.

Collect

A pack holds 5 pages. Every page belongs to one of 5 rarities, and the chance of each is published in the game before you buy, as it is here.

The pack that holds your 90th page since the guarantee last came round always contains an Art: if it did not draw one on its own, its lowest-rarity page is replaced with one. From a count of zero, that is the 18th pack. An Art you draw by luck before then does not move the count — the guarantee comes round every 90 pages whatever luck brings — and every page counts toward it, including the pages you start with. Your progress toward the guarantee is shown in the Store.

Duplicate pages are recycled for tokens, which buy extra battles and raid attempts. Recycling never takes your last copy of a page.

An issue is 50 pages: 10 models, 5 pages each. Hold all 5 of a model's pages and her profile unlocks — where she is from, a few sentences written with her, and a short clip.

Battle

A battle is fought with 7 pages: the 5 you choose, one per rarity slot, and 2 drawn from the rest of your collection when the match is dealt.

• 5 rounds. Each is worth one point, except the last, which is worth 3, so a match can never end level.
• A page rolls the twenty-sided dice its rarity gives it — Common 1 die, Art 5 dice — and the highest single die is its result. The higher result wins the round, and a tie goes to whoever revealed second.
• The winner of a round reveals first in the next one, so whoever is behind answers a target rather than setting one.
• Every battle opens with a boon: each side is offered 3 of the same tier, and the one you take bends the dice for the rest of the match.
• Art and Marvelous pages carry an effect as well, one signature per model. An effect changes when a page is worth playing, never how hard it hits.

• Encore Art — +2 dice on the page you play next round
• Spotlight Art — when it reveals first, the page that answers it rolls one die fewer
• Momentum Art — if it wins its round, you still reveal second next round
• Composure Marvelous — never rolls below 15
• Warm-up Marvelous — +1 die on the page you play next round
• Understudy Marvelous — if it loses its round, +5 dice on the page you play next round

Live

A live battle is against another person, 90 seconds a move, played over an evening or a week — you both get on with your day between rounds. A move you miss loses that round and nothing else: the match carries on and your next move is yours again.

You can say something during a match, from a fixed list of remarks. There is no free-text chat in Gals.

Seasons

A season is a calendar month.

• Play 5 live rated battles in the month to reach the leaderboard.
• The top 100 are paid gems when the month ends.
• Every season starts everyone level: there is no rating carried forward.
• At most 3 rated battles against the same player a month, so two accounts cannot trade wins up the board.

The pass

Each month has a pass of 30 tiers, climbed by playing — battles, quests and the daily calendar — and never by spending. There is a free track everybody climbs and a paid track the month's pass unlocks. Two of the month's pages, a Rare page and a Splendid page, are named in advance, so you know what you are climbing towards before the month starts.

The raid and the runway

Every week the whole game fights one boss, in 4 rotating fashion houses: Halcyon Holdings, The Ledger Agency, Maison Copie and Bureau Noir. You get 2 attacks a day, each spending pages from a deck that has to last the week, and everybody's damage goes on one health bar.

The runway takes no attacks at all. Send 5 pages on a show, and it walks while you are away; what it earns is the materials the Atelier makes wardrobe pieces from. A page wearing a wardrobe piece rolls better — but wardrobe items are switched off in every ranked battle, so nothing you win outside the collection follows you onto the leaderboard.