A War of Whispers is a board game for 2 to 4 players. Five mighty empires are at war for the planet, but you are no mighty ruler. Instead, you are a secret society that is betting on the results of this war while pulling strings to rig the results and ensure their bets pay off. A War of Whispers is a game of hidden agendas, deep strategy, and shifting loyalties.

You begin the game with five loyalty tokens, each corresponding to one of the five different empires, bet randomly on a loyalty value. Your primary objective is to ensure that when the game ends, the empires you are most loyal to control the most cities across the globe. Gameplay is made up of turns broken down into four phases:

• Deploy agents phase: In player order (starting with the first player and proceeding clockwise), every player removes, then deploys agents to empire councils, the positions on the board marked Sheriff, Steward, Marshall, and Chancellor.
• Empire turns phase: Each council position on each empire council takes an action. If a player has obtained cards, they may play them during this phase.
• Cleanup phase: Add the turn marker to the next space on the turn tracker, then every player discards down to the hand limit of five cards
• Swap phase: In player order, every player may swap two of their unrevealed loyalty tokens. If you decide to do so, you must reveal both of the swapped loyalty tokens. They remain revealed for the remainder of the game.

Gameplay follows this order four times. When the last space on the turn track is filled, the game is over immediately and scoring commences. The player with the most points based off their empire loyalties and the cities they control wins the game