She looks up at it and compares it with her map.

"I think so? I'm still having a little trouble telling some of the SCOL characters apart," she admits. That's normal, right? Weiss has been busy with magic and inter-world contact and stuff, and even if she's probably started picking up a little SCOL just from immersion she probably hasn't gotten to the point of being confident about the difference between "ke", "ge", "ne", and "|e" across fonts.

She shrugs.

"Well, worst case we'll see more of the city, right?"

"Gods, I can't tell any of it apart at all, really." She huffs and lashes her tail, then starts bouncing on her feet as she walks. "I hope there's Notal translations of the game."

There were not any Notal translations an hour ago!

þereminia cannot really afford to reprint and translate everything that their visitors might conceivably want to see. But Weiss expressed an interest in this particular tournament before being sent off to meet with her lookalikes, so it will just happen that a Notal translation has been created, and is getting delivered in a few minutes.

"Right? Even if not, we can probably get someone to translate, though."

She pushes open the door to the shop, revealing a long, slightly trapezoidal room filled with tables and squashy chairs. Board and card games line the walls, but apart from the small checkout kiosk by the door, it looks less like a shop and more like a library.

The person behind the kiosk looks up from chatting with another customer, spots the ears, and addresses them in passable Notal.

"Hello — I am Zerish. You look for what?"

"Hi! I'm Weiss, and this is one of the locals pretending to be me. We were both interested in the Card Reality tournament?" she explains.

"Ahh, board games that aren't chess! I wonder if people here would like Homestead... Some friends and I have been working on it for a while..."

The shopkeep raises an eyebrow.

"It is like what kind of game?" they ask.

"You're trying to build a village by putting people on jobs? Oh, don't mind me, we're here for Card Reality. Maybe later."

... they are like 0.43 sure that she is fucking with them. You don't just drop a teaser like that and then completely fail to elaborate.

But that is totally in line with the description of Kitsune, so they should have expected as much, really. They're both just doing a job.

"Okay — We are doing a series of 4 person starting games. The people with the most points, they go into a ..."

The shopkeep searches for the Notal word 'bracket', fails to come up with it, and gestures at a double-elimination tournament bracket drawn on the whiteboard a bit down the wall, waiting for names to be filled in.

"... and then the winner of the games is the winner of the whole thing. The starting games, everything is reset between them. The final games, you can carry effects from the games all the way, so you need to be careful. Can I, uh, ... I write down two 'Weiss', it will be confusing. What should I write for you?"

"I can be just 'kitsune'."

She immediately stomps down the urge to say the same thing, because that's almost certainly not what the real Weiss would do. Is coming up with another equally bland game name the right thing, here? Or should she just graciously accept being given the name Weiss uncontested?

"Put me down as 'the winner'," she tells the clerk.

There's a reason that all major þereminian languages have a quotation-marking distinction. The clerk sighs, and puts both of their names down in Notal on their registry.

"Okay. I think you haven't played Card Reality before? We have some Notal cards coming before the games start, but for now maybe you want to talk to Artema, who speaks well and knows the game?"

They point across the room to a broad woman with close-cropped hair, who is sitting at one of the tables and talking with some other players.

"Good idea to not start with 'literally no idea how this game works', yes." She giggles a bit.

They can go over and politely wave?

Artema looks up and waves back.

"Good morning! Can I help you with something?" she asks. Her accent is poor but her grammar is good.

"We're new to Card Reality and were hoping you could give us an overview before the tournament," she replies.

"Oh, sure, I'd be happy to. Please, take a seat. I'm Artema."

She waves them toward some open chairs.

Focus time. Is it like MtG? Who knows. 

It is vaguely like MtG, in that there are cards, and a lot of complex details! It is unlike MtG in that the cards aren't collectable — everyone will be playing with a common set of cards. There are still deckbuilding elements, though.

Everybody starts with a hand of three cards and a deck of ten, randomly dealt. Five cards from the common deck in the middle of the table are flipped over to form the 'shop'. Cards have different purchase and activation prices. Paying the purchase price gets the card from the common deck onto the bottom of your deck. Paying the activation price plays a card from your hand. Your deck also acts as a health counter — if you run out of cards, you're out. So you need to be careful to purchase more cards than you play. But also, if you can remember how many cards ago someone bought a card, you can potentially deal damage to them to keep it away from them, since everybody's deck effectively acts as a queue.

Cards come in various types. The most common type generates resources in different ways, and can be sacrificed to block attacks according to a rock-paper-scissors style chain of elemental weaknesses. Other types include cards that can launch an attack every turn, cards that have a one-time effect, and cards that change the rules.

It's this last type of card from which the game gets its name. Details like the maximum hand size, the size of the shop, additional tariffs on purchasing, playing, or activating cards, the elemental weaknesses, the conditions to spend certain resources, and the effects of different classes of card can all be changed by playing rules cards to the table. Many rules cards can be damaged, so rules can change not only when someone plays such a card, but also in the middle of resolving an attack or stack of actions.

Since all the cards that people play after their starting 21 ("Oh, uh, sorry — I meant 'thirteen'") pass through the shop, you can potentially keep an eye out for upcoming rules changes, which is what makes Card Reality more of a strategy game than a children's game or a diplomacy game. The challenge comes from building up your resource base to snap good cards out of the shop as they come up, keeping track of what cards your opponents are going to have soon so that you can preemptively adapt to rules changes, and maintaining strategic ambiguity about what cards you have by deploying effects that shuffle or otherwise manipulate your deck.

That all is the core game — there have been three releases of core cards, and the tournament will be using a deck made from the last two, after some complaints about unfair combos in the first release. There are also expansion packs mostly centered around a particular aesthetic or mechanic, and the tournament will be including the time manipulation, delayed effect, and dragon-themed expansion packs, which are largely agreed to be the most fun.

Artema is clearly passionate about the game, and weaves in some strategic advice about particular cards throughout the explanation.

...She used to play a deck building thing where you had to think about draw chance all the time, hopefully that will at least prepare her? Okay, come on Weiss, think, what is the expected benefit of grabbing this card over that one... 

(She looks very focused. Her ears twitch occasionally.)

It's not all about draw chance, but keeping track of draw chance and counting cards will get her pretty far. The early game is really dominated by luck, but it takes strategy to consolidate that random opening into a solid position for the mid-game. Games tend to have a series of near-misses where people manage to counter each other's attempts to win until someone manages to swing a sudden victory.

Since the games don't all take the same amount of time, in between games people hang around some of the tables and quietly socialize, or browse the games lining the walls of the shop.

She is focused. She is in the zone. She attempts to research Card Reality meta on her phone. (Iiiiiif there's a machine translation feature, that is.)

There is not. þereminia has a lot of cool technology, but it lags behind Earth in several ways. There is kludgy, occasionally incorrect machine translation between LCTL and SCOL — but those are both constructed languages with simple grammars explicitly designed to be machine parseable in principle. Not only do they not have enough of a Notal corpus to use statistical learning techniques, they haven't even invented good statistical learning techniques for text.

She can get a hacky open-source for-fun project that can translate known vocabulary, getting maybe one word in three, and which horribly mangles the grammar. Anything more sophisticated will have to go through a person.