Week 7 Session: The Extra Turn Is the Whole Game

The action economy — Press Turn written out in six lines, what falls out of it, and the strategy that empties it of decisions

5 April 2027

An action economy is the purest form of this course's claim — a handful of rules, no hidden numbers, and a fight that is entirely arithmetic.

Press Turn, from Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, is six lines long.

1. At the start of your side’s turn you get one icon per living combatant on the field, up to four.
2. Taking an action normally spends one icon.
3. If the action hits a weakness, lands a critical, or is a pass, it spends half an icon instead — a full icon becomes a blinking half icon.
4. Half icons always expire. You can’t half them twice.
5. If an action is nulled, drained or reflected, you lose icons — one, or all of them, depending on how badly.
6. The enemy plays by every rule above.

No damage formula. No hidden stat. Nothing worth modelling in the randomness. And it is the most demanding combat in the genre.

What falls out of six lines#

Rule 3 makes information the resource. A fight you know is nearly free; a fight you don’t know costs icons to probe, and rule 5 makes probing expensive on exactly the enemies you most want to probe.

Rule 6 is the one that does the work. A four-icon party facing a four-icon enemy group is symmetrical, so anything you can do to them they can do to you — and one reflected spell can take your whole turn away and hand them a half icon. Difficulty in Nocturne isn’t a stat block. It’s the same six rules pointed back at you.

Rule 1 means that losing a party member costs you an icon every turn for the rest of the fight. The death spiral isn’t a metaphor, it’s arithmetic, and a player who has read these six lines fights differently at three combatants than at four.

The degenerate strategy#

Every action economy has one. Press Turn’s is this: build a party that covers every element, learn the enemy’s weakness once, and the fight collapses into “hit weakness, repeat” with icons that never run out. The decision the system was built to create — spend information or spend icons — stops existing.

Nocturne’s answers are worth studying because they’re all cheap. Enemies that null or repel an element punish blind probing under rule 5. Bosses carry two or more icons on their own, so the symmetry that protects you at four combatants doesn’t protect you against one. And some enemies have no weakness at all, which quietly removes the strategy’s first move.

Note what none of those answers are: none of them is more HP.

Write the rules, then break them#

Write Press Turn’s rules on one page, in your own words, precisely enough that somebody who has never played could run a fight by hand. Then find the strategy that empties it of decisions, and write the smallest rule change that puts the decision back.

Bring both pages. We’ll run somebody else’s rules by hand against a made-up encounter, and the places their page forces us to guess are the places their rules aren’t finished.