Arena Rex Forums

Can you voluntarily take a clear turn?

It seems weird that you cannot, but I don't see rules explicitly saying you can.

It seems odd to force an exhausted model to wait for all of their team mates to become exhausted before they can try to catch their breath. Kind of gamey, and not intuitive.

We've been playing that you can take clear turns whenever, and it seems to work fine.

Is there some sort of abuse that makes this less desirable than limiting clear turns until everyone is exhausted? And if so, what is the head Canon you use to make it make sense?

you do not need to go to exhausted, just everyone fatigued.

A lot of abilities can only be done on clear turns and having them whenever you want wont work well.

Remember whenever you activate a model you can remove one fatigue from a fatigued model (not an exhausted one).

Also, remember you May remove a fatigue from a model at the beginning of every turn, you don't have to. This can cause the clears much faster. And yes, you have to be strategic about when you exhaust your models or they will get left in the dust!

I think it's definitely intentional that clear turns only come when their condition is met. Basically, the game tries to retain a bit of the traditional turn structure, where all of your models activate and then all of my models activate. Clear turns are meant to be the markers that separate one turn from the next in some way, like an "end phase".

If you could choose to take clear turns whenever you want, you could choose to play the whole game with just one model much more effectively than you can now. Like:

1. Activate mounted Zahra. Exhaust her and Sereqet fully.
2. Take a clear turn. All fatigue is removed (due to Will of Anthony) and Sereqet makes a wild attack.
3. Activate mounted Zahra. Exhaust her and Sereqet fully.
4. Take a clear turn. All fatigue is removed (due to Will of Anthony) and Sereqet makes a wild attack.

That's not something you can do as the rules are today, unless they are the only models left on your side.

Not that there is anything wrong with that. I'm sure the game plays just fine and is pretty much the same if you play it that you can choose to take clear turns anytime. You just run a risk of running into an ability where something might seem off.

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A clear turn is initiated automatically once certain conditions are met. You cannot voluntarily choose to take one (conversely, you cannot choose to skip it either.
(Rules PDF pg. 5) "When all of your models start the turn Fatigued or Exhausted, a clear turn is initiated."



I think this is one of the parts of the game that makes it more than just a dice-chucking luck-fest. The decision of whether or not to exhaust (and thus leave them exposed), planning your activations and reactions to optimize your clear turns, that's where the real strategy kicks in. Technically, I guess it is rather gamey, but it's one of the best parts of the game for me.


Some of the potential abuses have been mentioned by others, but I think it's that removal of the strategic layer that would make the game suffer the most.
As far as making sense of that in a thematic way, maybe you can think about turns not really being exactly linear like they are played. That's just the way it is represented so the action can be depicted in an orderly manner and the game can be played. Maybe it all really happens almost simultaneously between clear turns. So the fact that a model spent six turns in an Exhausted State (and probably being beat on) doesn't exactly represent the amount of time that elapsed, but simply the level of action that occurred in that time. I don't know, I guess I never saw it as an issue, so it's hard to think of solutions... but I hope you do because it's a great game and you should enjoy playing it, but I know it's hard to do that sometimes if things don't seem to make sense.

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