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You are Aetius, patrician and master of the soldiers in the West, in the spring of 451. Attila has crossed the Rhine with the peoples of his empire. You have scarcely left the Alps, Sidonius says, with ✦ "a thin and scanty strength of auxiliaries". Your army is a coalition of old enemies: the Visigoths whom your generals fought twelve years ago, an Alan king suspected of treason, Franks and Burgundians who also march with Attila. Jordanes calls what follows ✦ "a war savage, manifold, monstrous, stubborn".

1. Fortnights. Eight fortnights from March to July 451, then the wagon fort, the late summer, and an epilogue for 452, 453 and 454. The sources rarely give a day: the fortnights are the game's.
2. Cards. Each fortnight opens with the events of the documents and often a card from the pool. Every card cites its source ✦: the link opens the passage in the documentary apparatus The Catalaunian Fields, 451.
3. The coalition. Six allies, each with strength and commitment. Allies at commitment 3 or more fight at full strength; at 2, partly; below, hardly at all. The Visigoths fight only when they have joined you: commitment 3, and a fortnight to march up from Toulouse. In Jordanes Theoderic agrees at once; in Sidonius the Goths wait at home until Avitus fetches them. You can do it either way.
4. Annona. Grain and pay for the armies. The prefect Ferreolus brings in more (once a fortnight); an army on the Rhône or the Loire eats, and the Goths eat more. When the bread runs out, the auxiliaries go home.
5. Attila's road runs Rhine, Metz, Belgica, Champagne, Orléans. Metz burns on Easter eve in every game: it is the first fixed point of the sources. Then he besieges Orléans.
6. Orléans is a race. The relief comes at the end of a fortnight in which your army is on the Loire and the Goths have joined. Earthworks (Jordanes) make the walls hold longer; without them you arrive as the walls shake (Gregory), or after the Huns are inside (the Life of Anianus); too late, and the city is plundered. If Sangiban's Alans waver and Orléans has no earthworks, he may open a gate. You can also offer battle before Attila reaches the Loire: the battle is then fought "not far from Metz", as Hydatius has it.
7. The battle follows Jordanes: the soothsayers and the ninth hour, the hill, Sangiban in the middle, the fight, Theoderic's death, the night. Where it is fought depends on you: on the Catalaunian fields if you follow and choose the ground, at Mauriacus near Troyes if you press Attila hard.
8. The wagon fort. The sources give three accounts of the next morning: starve him out; send Thorismud home for the balance against the Goths (Jordanes); or send the Goths and the Franks home and keep the spoils (the Copenhagen continuation, Gregory). You choose, and the epilogue answers.
9. The epilogue. In 452 Attila comes back through the Alps; Prosper reproaches Aetius for not holding the passes. In 453 Attila dies. In 454 the emperor kills Aetius with his own hand, in every source; in the game your standing at court decides whether he does.
10. The accounting separates what the field decided (Orléans, the battle, Italy) from what the palace decided (your standing, the coalition, the Goths, the spoils, your life).

Prototype 0: every number is provisional and lives in deck.json. Where the game goes beyond the sources (the camp stormed, Attila starved out, Aetius alive after 454), the chronicle says "in this game". A strategy guide gives the lessons of 400 bot games.