Quick start for new authors

1. Look at the three shared Goals and your hand of Pony and Ship cards.
2. On your turn, play at least one card. The usual play is one Ship plus one new Pony.
3. Keep every card connected to Fanfic Author Twilight, the black Start card.
4. Resolve the Ship power first, then the newly attached Pony's power.
5. Claim any active Goal you complete. Empty Goal spaces wait until the next turn to refill.
6. Finish with your hand limit, normally seven cards, using any mix of Pony and Ship cards.

Expansion packs and alternate Starts

A room uses only the packs selected by its host. The app imports the supplied cards.pon manifests, enforces their Goal conditions, and presents choices for special powers without revealing private hands or deck order to other players.

• Official sets: Extra Credit, Ponyville University, No Holds Barred, the 2014/2015 convention cards, 2015 Workshop, Fluffle Puff, Gracious Givers, Hearthswarming, The Mean Six, Weeaboo Paradaisu, New New Core, and So Long and Thanks are selectable.
• Alternate Starts: Fanfic Author Discord is available with 2015 Con. Multiplicity adds ten Twilight Starts; choose exactly one while creating or editing a setup room.
• Power Gaming: selectable as a clearly marked draft/WIP pack. Its supplied scoring events, hand rotation, stealing, retrieval, sweeping, and Shipwrecker rules are tracked by the table.
• Panels of Ponies: browse-only. The newer public implementation recovered most of its mappings, but Mayor Mare / Savvy Bureaucrat and Flaxseed still have no recoverable power text in either supplied source, so the app does not pretend the pack is complete.

Card text still overrides the general rules. Passive protections such as “cannot Replace,” “cannot Swap,” protected shipped Ponies, multi-Pony counts, and global race/keyword changes are applied before Goal checks.

Objective and scoring

Complete the conditions on active Goal cards and keep the Goals you win. Their point values are added to your score immediately. The first player to reach the target wins at once.

Most Goals have a fixed value. Friendship is Benefits is worth 3 points, or 4 when the six qualifying Mane 6 Ponies do not repeat a name keyword. Help! I'm Trapped in a Shipping Card Game! is worth 0 points but permanently raises its winner's hand limit by one.

Setup

1. Separate the purple Pony, pink Ship, and blue Goal cards into three decks.
2. Set aside the black Fanfic Author Twilight Start card and shuffle each deck.
3. Place the Start card in the middle of the shipping grid.
4. Reveal three shared active Goals.
5. Deal each player four Pony cards and three Ship cards as a private hand.
6. The player to the dealer's left takes the first turn.

Never combine the three decks or their discard piles. Earned Goals stay with their winners.

Your turn

1. Refill Goals. Fill spaces left by Goals won on the previous turn. If a newly revealed Goal is already true before you act, discard it and reveal another; nobody wins it for an unchanged grid.
2. Play cards. You must play at least one card and may continue playing as many legal cards as you wish. Discarding a card from your hand for a power is not the same as playing it.
3. Resolve powers and Goals. Complete each effect in order. Goals are checked at stable moments between complete effects, not halfway through one.
4. Refill your hand. Draw up to or discard down to your hand limit. Choose the full Pony/Ship draw mixture before looking at any of the new cards.

The current rules do not provide a normal mulligan for an awkward hand. The app may offer a clearly labelled stuck-hand safeguard only when it can verify that no legal play exists.

Shipping, adjacency, and the Start card

• A normal play attaches a Ship to a Pony already on the grid, then attaches a new Pony to the Ship's free end.
• Ships connect orthogonally: above, below, left, or right. Diagonal cards are not adjacent.
• A Pony card may have at most one Ship on each of its four sides. Every Ship has exactly two Pony endpoints.
• You may place a Ship between two adjacent Ponies already on the grid, even if they were sitting next to one another without a Ship.
• Any versions, races, or genders may be shipped together unless a card explicitly says otherwise.
• Every grid card must remain connected by Ships to the Start card. Discard cards that become disconnected, including any Ships left without two endpoints.

Fanfic Author Twilight cannot normally be moved, removed, replaced, or swapped. Derpy Hooves is the explicit exception: her mandatory power swaps the Start card with a Pony card on the grid. The Start card's new position then remains the grid's connection anchor.

Power timing and common powers

For a normal Pony-and-Ship play, use this order:

1. Attach the Ship and Pony, then check Goals on the stable grid.
2. Resolve the Ship's power completely, then check Goals again.
3. Resolve the newly attached Pony's power completely, clean up disconnected cards, then check Goals again.

A power containing may is optional. A mandatory power must be completed if possible. Adding a Ship between two Ponies already on the grid does not activate an endpoint Pony power in the standard game; doing so is an optional advanced-table rule.

Draw

Optionally draw one Pony or one Ship.

Swap

Exchange Pony-card positions without activating their printed powers. Old relationships that change are broken, and the newly formed relationships count as Ships played this turn. A Ship whose same two Ponies merely trade ends is not broken.

Replace

While the card is in hand, discard a non-Start Pony and play the replacing card in that position. This counts as playing one Pony card. Hand-only Replace powers cannot be copied.

Search

Take one chosen card from the Pony or Ship discard pile into your hand. If it remains in your hand when the turn ends, discard it.

New Goal

Optionally discard one active Goal and reveal a replacement.

Copy

Copy the power of a Pony card currently on the grid, except a Changeling. Copy does not gain the target's name, symbols, or keywords and cannot use a hand-only Replace power.

Goals, chains, and counting

• When an active Goal becomes true during your turn, take it immediately. You may win several Goals at the same stable check.
• Do not refill an earned Goal's space until the next player's turn in the standard game.
• A chain is a connected group linked through Ships. It may branch or loop.
• Every Pony traversed for a chain Goal must satisfy that Goal's qualifier. Two matching Ponies are not in a qualifying chain if the only route between them passes through a nonmatching Pony.
• When a Goal says Pony, Flim & Flam and Aloe & Lotus count as two Ponies even though each is one Pony card. A relationship touching either double-Pony card counts as two Ships; double-to-double still counts as two, not four.
• The Wonderbolts are one Pony and may count as male or female. Gender-changing effects do not alter the Wonderbolts or genderless Ponies.
• Alicorns are a separate race and are not automatically Princesses. They count as Pegasi only for Pomf! and as Unicorns only for It's Magical: Horns Are Touching.

A Ship is broken when an endpoint moves or leaves, the Ship card leaves, or the whole relationship is discarded. Goal checks that say “this turn” remember plays, swaps, Love Poisons, gender changes, and broken relationships even when those cards later move again.

Love Poison, Changelings, and other special powers

Love Poison Ships

Instead of an ordinary play, a Love Poison may take a non-Start Pony from elsewhere on the grid and reattach it in a new legal position with that Ship. Discard the moved Pony's former Ships, discard any components that lose their route to the Start card, and then activate the moved Pony's power. Treat the move as one atomic action so the chosen Pony is not discarded merely for being temporarily detached.

Changelings

• When a Changeling is played or moved, the current player chooses a new disguise matching its printed race pool.
• The disguise supplies one Pony's name, keywords, gender, race, and timeline symbols until the end of the turn, but not its power.
• The card keeps the Changeling keyword. Race Change and “Yer a Princess, Harry!” cannot affect it.
• The three ordinary Changelings are genderless; Queen Chrysalis is female and uses the Alicorn disguise pool.
• A Changeling may represent Flim, Flam, Aloe, or Lotus individually, but never a double-Pony pair.

Core special Pony reminders

• Discord: permute two or three selected Pony-card positions; none of the selected cards may remain in its original position.
• Pinkamena: Replace a Pony with Pinkamena from hand, then discard another non-Start Pony.
• Gypsy Witch Pinkie Pie: draw three Pony/Ship cards in any mixture, then discard two cards from hand.
• Freedom Fighter Pinkie Pie: take up to two cards from the Pony and/or Ship discards; discard any that remain in hand at turn end.
• Mahou Shoujo Derpy: swap each nonempty Pony or Ship discard with its matching deck, then discard every active Goal and reveal replacements.
• Cheerilee: may be discarded from hand to draw two Pony/Ship cards. Because she was discarded rather than played, this alone does not satisfy the turn's play requirement.

Empty decks and forced sacrifices

1. When a deck is empty, shuffle its matching discard pile to form a new deck.
2. If you must draw a Pony or Ship and both that deck and its discard are empty, choose any grid card except the Start card and discard it. Apply all normal broken-Ship and disconnected-card cleanup.
3. Once the requested card type has reached its discard pile, shuffle that discard into its deck and finish the draw. If the first sacrifice did not create the needed type, repeat as necessary.
4. An empty Goal deck is rebuilt from the Goal discard pile. Goals already won by players are not recycled.

Current Core 1.1.5 rulings and errata

Use these rulings when an older quick-reference card, bundle description, or online implementation differs:

• The winning targets are 11 points for 2–3 players, 9 for 4 players, and 7 for 5 or more.
• New Goal powers discard the chosen active Goal; they do not place it on the bottom of the Goal deck.
• Mahou Shoujo Derpy discards the active Goals before replacements are revealed.
• Friendship is Benefits uses only its 3-or-4-point condition; an older bonus-draw ability is not part of the current card.
• Search cards go into the player's hand and are discarded at turn end only if they were not used.
• Race-changing and Princess-changing Ships cannot affect any Pony carrying the Changeling keyword.
• An already-satisfied Goal revealed during normal refill is discarded rather than awarded.
• When a Pony or Ship draw cannot be supplied, the sacrifice may begin with any non-Start grid card, not only a Ship.
• Card text overrides the general rules. The Start card remains protected unless a card explicitly names an exception.

Official variants

The standard online table uses three shared Goals. These published variants are useful for private or house-rule play when everyone agrees and the room supports the required options.

Private Goals

Give each player three private Goals kept separately from the normal hand. Players may complete their own Goals whenever their conditions occur, including on another player's turn.

Shipfic Bridge

Play in teams, sharing earned Goals and score. Use the normal target for the total player count.

Greased Lightning

Refill an empty Goal space immediately. If the revealed Goal is already true, the current player wins it instead of discarding it.

Early Game Boost

Begin with a legal random grid of 4, 8, or 16 Ponies and their Ships, then reveal suitable Goals.

Long Haul

Ignore the normal target. End when a deck runs out with no discard available before forced-sacrifice rules are used; highest score wins.

Ridiculously Long Haul

Continue until every Goal has been achieved, then compare scores.

Solitaire

Play ten rounds and treat the final score as a personal high score.

Beginner strategy

• Read all three Goals before choosing a play; one placement can often complete more than one.
• Plan Ship powers before Pony powers. A temporary gender, race, or timeline change may unlock a Goal before it expires.
• Protect the route back to the Start card. Swap, Replace, Love Poison, and discard effects can remove an entire branch.
• Keep enough of both card types to make ordinary plays, but do not feel locked to a four-Pony/three-Ship hand.
• Use the card inspector to check exact wording before confirming a power.