How to play

The Palworld Trading Card Game is a two-player game where you build a team of Pals and attack until your opponent's life runs out. This is a plain-language summary of the basics — the official rulebooks are linked at the bottom and always take precedence.

How you win

Each player starts on 10 life. You lose the moment your life hits 0 — or if your deck runs out of cards. Your deck is both your resources and your buffer, so milling through it is its own kind of clock.

What you bring

  • Main deck — exactly 50 cards, made of Pal, Gear, Structure and Event cards.
  • Soul deck — 10 Soul cards, kept separate. This is where your resources come from.

The five card types

Pal
Your creatures. They battle, block, and form the core of your strategy.
Gear
Equip to your Pals, or deal damage to your opponent's.
Structure
Deployed to your base for ongoing effects. Pals can work here.
Event
One-time effects, used and then discarded.
Soul
Your resource. Rest souls to pay for everything you play.

Setting up

  1. Shuffle your main deck and place it, along with your soul deck, in front of you.
  2. Decide who goes first — rock-paper-scissors works.
  3. The player going second moves 1 card from their soul deck into their soul area, standing. That's their compensation for the turn disadvantage.
  4. Each player draws 5 cards.
  5. Starting with the player going first, each player may mulligan once: shuffle their whole hand back in and draw 5 fresh cards.
  6. Each player sets their life to 10.

A turn, phase by phase

  1. Stand phase — Stand all the cards in your base, readying them for the turn.
  2. Draw phase — Draw 1 card. The player going first skips this on their very first turn.
  3. Soul phase — Move 2 cards from your soul deck into your soul area, standing.
  4. Main phase — The turn itself: play cards, use abilities, and attack, in any order and any number of times.
  5. End phase — All damage marked on Pals and structures resets to 0.

You pay for cards by resting souls — turning them sideways. Souls stand back up on your next Stand phase, so your usable resources grow by 2 every turn. Once per turn you may also rest 3 souls to draw a card.

Battles

Rest one of your Pals to attack. You may target the opposing player, or any of their structures or rested Pals — a Pal standing in their base can't be attacked directly.

Before damage, the defender may block: rest one of their standing Pals to make it the new target instead. They can also play cards with the Quick icon at this point.

When two Pals clash, both deal damage equal to their power to each other, and anything with damage at or above its power (or a structure's durability) goes to the graveyard. Structures never deal damage back.

Damage checks and the Lucky icon

Hitting a player doesn't take life directly. The attacker's strike value decides how many cards the defender flips off the top of their deck into the graveyard, one at a time.

If any flipped card shows the Lucky icon, flipping stops and the damage is cancelled entirely — no life lost. Otherwise, once enough cards have been flipped, the defender loses that much life.

That's why decks may run at most 8 Lucky cards: they're effectively armour, and the cap keeps them from making a deck unkillable.

Building a deck

  • 50cards in the main deck, exactly
  • 2colors at most
  • 4copies sharing a card name
  • 8cards with the Lucky icon
  • 10soul cards, optional

Colorless cards are exempt from the color limit. Alternate artwork and reprints all count toward the same 4 copies.

The deck builder checks all of these for you as you build.

Good to know

  • You can have at most 5 Pals in your base. Structures and Gears are unlimited.
  • You can only attack Pals that are rested, never ones standing in the base.
  • Running out of cards in your deck loses you the game, however much life you have.
  • A Pal can attack the same turn it's deployed.

Official rules

Everything above is a summary. For the real thing, go to the publisher's official rules page, which always links the current documents:

PalStash is an unofficial fan project. Rules and card data belong to Bushiroad / Pocketpair; where this page and the official documents disagree, the official ones are right.