I have been challenged to use my mind powers to tell you how the game works. Don't ask me for action windows or timing structures or anything, but I got a decent idea of it.
At the start of a round, take all your dice and place them on the respective cards.
You take turns taking 1 action.
Actions Include:
Activate- Roll 1 die on one of your cards and add it to your dice pool
Play card- Spend resources to play a card
Claim Battlefield- Claim the battlefield. You may not take any more actions this turn, and go first next round.
Dice Action:
A dice action means spending dice with the same symbol to gain an effect.
Melee damage- Spend X Melee to deal X damage to a character
Range damgage- Spend X Range to deal X damage to a character
(Range and melee do the same thing, but only one type may be spent at a time.
Resource- Spend X resource symbols to gain X resources
Disrupt - Spend X disrupt to force opponent to lose X resources
Shield- Spend X shields to add X shield tokens to a character. Shield tokens can be spent to prevent one damage
Discard- Spend X discard to force opponent to discard X cards at random.
Focus- Spend a focus to change one of your dice facings.
Special- Trigger a special ability
First to kill all of the opponents characters wins. Characters are chosen like heroes in Lotr, except you have a maximum number of "threat" or "squad points" depending on what you want to call it.
No other characters come into play during the game. However, supports often act like characters except without Health Points, and you may Upgrade your characters.
Seems very much like a 25 minute Runebound combat to me. Makes sense since Lukas designed Runebound. Could be interesting, but ultimately I won't decide until I see how deckbuilding works.