I built MORANA around one stubborn question: what happens if the most important zone in the game is completely public? The answer reshaped everything. Both graveyards lie face up, you can read the opponent's whole comeback like a chessboard, and the only hidden thing left in the entire game is a single move each turn.
Most card games treat the graveyard as a bin. Cards die, they go there, and the pile mostly matters through hidden channels: a shuffle back into a face-down deck, a card in a concealed hand that cares about it, a face-down trap. The interesting information about the dead is almost always tangled up with information you cannot see. I wanted to do the opposite, and see what the game became.
Once the dead are public, the graveyard stops being a bin and becomes a board you calculate. You can look at your opponent's Nav and read their entire recovery: which Spirits they can bring back, what each one costs, what it will do, and in what order they would want to do it. It is the difference between playing against a fog and playing against a chess position. You are not guessing what might come back. You are counting exactly what will, and planning three turns deep to be ready for it.
This does something quietly radical to skill. When the comeback is knowable, losing to it is never variance. You did not get unlucky; you missed a line that was sitting there face up the whole time. That is the kind of loss that makes you better, because the information you needed was never hidden from you.
If the grave is open, what carries the bluff? Exactly one thing. Each turn, both players secretly choose a single card and commit it face down, then reveal at the same moment. That simultaneous commit is the only concealed information anywhere in MORANA, and because it is the only one, it carries all the weight. Every mind game, every read, every dare lives in that one card. You are not spreading your attention across a hidden hand, a hidden deck, and a face-down row. You are staring at one decision and trying to out-read a person.
Designers talk about hidden-information bloat: games that pile up concealed zones until no single one is legible and the whole thing turns into a guessing fog. Making the grave public let me delete almost all of it and keep the one piece that actually generates tension. One bluff, sharpened, beats ten bluffs blurred together.
Open information turned out to be a scalpel for complexity. A game that leans on hidden zones needs rules to police them: what you may look at, when things flip, how to prove you did not cheat, how to remember a face-down board. Because MORANA hides only one card at a time and reveals it immediately, most of that rules mass simply never had to exist. New players are not tracking secrets; they are reading an open board and making one committed guess. It is why a full duel teaches in a couple of minutes and still runs deep, and it is the same instinct behind the game's fixed, luck-light resource system: fewer places for the game to decide things instead of you. If you want the mechanics laid out, the how to play page walks the whole turn, and skill vs luck covers why so little is left to chance.
The honest fear with any open-information design is that it goes cold. If both players can see everything, will the game feel solved, like two calculators trading optimal moves with no pulse? The single hidden commit is the answer, but a hunch is not proof. So the tension of that one move had to survive real pressure, not just read well on paper.
That is where the rest of the process comes in. A simulator has played the full ruleset well over a hundred thousand times, hunting for lines where the open board makes a matchup lopsided or a deck degenerate, and each fix is re-proven before anything is final. The machine confirms the math stays fair; human playtests judge whether that one hidden move still makes your pulse jump. If you want to see that half of the work, the balance dev log lays it out in the open, including the fixes I rejected.
Open information is a taste, and I would rather name that than pretend it is for everyone. If what you love about card games is the swing of a topdeck and the chaos of a hidden bomb you never saw coming, MORANA deliberately gives you less of that. What it offers instead is the specific pleasure of a game you can actually read: outplaying a person because you counted the grave better and won the one bluff that mattered. That is the game I wanted to exist, and the whole design points at it.
The fastest way to feel whether open information is for you is to feel it, not read about it. You can play the First Duel free in your browser against an opponent that bluffs back, with the grave open the whole time, and you will know within one game whether reading a public board is your kind of tension. If it is, the best thing you can do is stand with the game early: join the founders list on the home page to help kickstart the First Turning, early-bird perks included.
This dev log describes the design intent of MORANA: The Open Grave at campaign stage. Rules may be refined before the campaign. The First Turning launch set is 62 cards, fixed distribution, with no booster packs.