Piston 2026

Piston is an engine-building card game set during the annual global Mechanical Competition, where you take on the role of the world's greatest engineers. You will compete to build the best machines in your workshop during the 3 day competition by generating the most Appeal from building and activating your machines. Each player plays an Engineer with a different ability.

The game is played over 3 rounds called "days" with each day divided into 4 turns - Morning, Midday, Afternoon, and Evening. On a turn, you must perform 1 main action - either build a machine, activate a powerful Tool machine or draw more cards from the deck.

Machines are built by using your multi-use Prototype cards - you must discard other cards from your hand to generate the specific resources required to build a card into a machine. Machines come in 5 types, each with a different activation condition for triggering their effects.

At the end of the game the winner will be the player with the most Appeal both for the machines themselves and from Appeal tokens generated by their machines during the game.

—description from the designer