A card you do not play costs you nothing

There is no penalty for a card you do not play, and there is no penalty for a card you attempt and miss. The sweep looks for the play, does not find it, and the card's clout simply stays on the table. Your ledger is not touched.

The card is not spent either. It is still in your hand the next morning, with the same value printed on it. A hand is four or five cards and one of them is a good day — nothing in the game asks you to clear the table.

A card leaves your hand when it pays, and only until its printed limit reopens it. That is what the frequency on the card means: 1/day is how often the card may score, not a deadline you are racing.

Which is why the slower cards sit still. A weekly or seasonal card keeps its place in your hand until you play it or until its window closes, rather than being replaced each morning with whatever came next.

Exactly one card in the launch deck subtracts: Botwork, a Legendary trap in the Trap set, printed at −30 clout with no limit on how often it can land. Everything else in the deck runs from +8 to +15.

A trap is never dealt into your hand. You will not see Botwork on your table, because there is nothing to play — it appears on the sweep that finds the pattern it describes in your public activity. The only way to go backwards is to do something the game reads as automated.

So the floor is clear: do nothing and you earn nothing, which is not the same as losing. The full rules are on how to play, and why ReplyRoyale never posts for you covers the other half of this — that there is nothing to submit either.

• What a sweep actually reads
• Why ReplyRoyale never posts for you
• How to play — the loop, the card, and the two clocks, in one page.