Only one device can control your account's gameplay at once. Logging in elsewhere takes over, and the old session is told explicitly why it stopped.
The basics
How to play
Villagers vs Monsters is an idle RPG you can dip into for thirty seconds or settle into for an hour. Everything that matters is decided by the server, so what you see is what actually happened.
The loop
Six steps, and you are playing.
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Make your two characters
Every account is free to run one Villager and one Monster. You do not pick a side permanently — you play both, and they progress separately.
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Move one tile at a time
The world is a grid and movement is north, east, south and west only — no diagonals. There is a hard limit of one move per second per character, and moves are never queued, so a held control never banks up a burst of steps.
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Work the land
Tiles carry actions: forage, mine, harvest, hunt. What a tile offers depends on where you are, and what you get out of it is rolled server-side against that location's loot table.
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Fight what finds you
Combat runs on a turn cadence of about two seconds. You can attack, cast or flee; if you queue nothing, your character falls back to a basic attack rather than standing still. While a fight owns you, you cannot walk away from the tile — fleeing is a combat action, not a movement one.
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Die, and lose only what you were carrying
On death, carried inventory is lost. Equipped gear stays equipped, and anything in village storage stays safe. You respawn and re-enter the loop.
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Settle down
Join a village, pick up a role and a district, and start turning raw resources into equipment. Monsters do the same thing in a den — fewer menus, more teeth.
Progress while you're away
Close the app and your character keeps earning. When you come back, an offline rewards claim shows the rate, the elapsed time and the total waiting for you.
Accrual is capped, so you cannot leave the game shut for a month and return to a fortune. Claiming preserves any sub-minute progress rather than rounding it away.
Rules worth knowing early
Movement, loot, damage and rewards are all resolved server-side. The app submits what you want to do; it never decides what happened.
Gold is earned in play and belongs to a single character. Secret Fire is premium, belongs to your whole account, and can skip some cooldowns or found a village.
System messages are visible to everyone, but village and local chat require a linked account. Local chat is scoped to your tile and is short-lived; village chat sticks around.
Fifteen items carried, ten equipment slots, fifty items in village storage. Deciding what to leave behind is part of the game.
Monster characters enter the world at camps, and cannot be attacked while standing on one. Villagers meet hostile animals in the wild instead.
Next: the world itself
Villages, districts, crafting and the gear you are working towards.