The player can begin combat from the visible board or from the card's back view. Both routes declare an attack against a specific target.
The fastest route is the right-click context menu. When a valid hostile target is available, the quick attack option lets the player strike without opening the card back. It is built for immediate room decisions and does not affect your base fighting chance. The attack will land on a random body part of the enemy (a chance weighted by size of the body part).
Turning an enemy card and using its Attack action is the deliberate route which allows you to commit an attack for a specific body part if you wish to, body parts may have different defense stats, but some might be much harder to hit than others.
Combat is not a room-wide command. The chosen enemy, object, or hostile card is the subject of the attack. Distance, equipment, target defenses, and special states can all change what happens after the command is chosen.
A weapon swing is physical work. Attacking spends stamina, so repeated fighting can exhaust a character even before health is threatened.
Every player attack draws from stamina. A character with low stamina may still see the enemy, still hold a weapon, and still want to fight, but the body has less room to pay for another committed strike.
Once the attack is paid for, combat resolves through the ordinary attack rules: the relevant attack stat decides whether the hit lands, and the target's defenses reduce the damage that gets through.
Weapons, enchantments, creature stats, and spell effects can add fire, ice, acid, holy, or dark damage. Those values are mitigated by matching elemental defenses, not by ordinary physical defense alone.
Enemies are not only targets. Their AI can select the player as a target, attack with their own weapons and stats, or use magic where their card and behavior allow it.
A hostile creature in position to fight can attack the player during its combat step. If the roll succeeds, the player takes damage after defense, dodge, armour, and resistances have done their work.
Some enemies threaten the player through magic rather than a simple weapon strike. Enemy spells can carry elemental damage, bypass the assumptions of ordinary melee range, and make magical defense matter.
Hostile actions can do more than remove health. Stun, elemental pressure, and other secondary effects can make the next turn worse even when the immediate damage looks survivable.
The player can be injured without an enemy making a weapon attack. The room, the event system, and the body's survival meters can all become sources of damage.
Traps punish movement, entry, interaction, or failed caution depending on the trap. Their damage is a direct dungeon consequence, not an enemy turn.
Events can injure the player through authored consequences. A ceiling collapse is the clean example: the room itself changes the health state of the character standing under it.
Hunger and thirst are not decorative meters. When neglected long enough, the body begins converting unmet need into harm and degraded performance.
Water can be terrain, resource, and threat. When the player is caught in a drowning state, damage comes from the environment rather than from a visible attacker.
Smoke-filled spaces can injure or pressure the player through exposure. It turns staying in the wrong room into a mounting cost.
Mining, unstable rooms, and event-driven hazards can bring the ceiling down. Collapse damage belongs to the world simulation: no enemy needs to be present for it to hurt.
Not every consequence is a single damage number. Some threats attach a condition to the player, then let time, movement, failed treatment, or continued exposure make the problem worse.
Afflictions are persistent injuries or conditions. They can come from hostile attacks, hazards, disease-like effects, environmental exposure, or special card rules. An affliction can modify stats, demand a specific cure, or become more serious if ignored.
Combat harm and survival harm can overlap. A wounded player who is also hungry, thirsty, choking on smoke, or carrying an affliction is not facing one system at a time. The dungeon's danger is cumulative.
Because attacks cost stamina and injuries can come from the room itself, leaving a fight, resting, drinking, curing an affliction, or changing rooms may be the correct combat action even when no attack is made that turn.