Scanner

Scanner is the only page in the game where somebody else can take the thing you were reading about.

Calls come through: a courier on his own, a pallet nobody signed for, an armoured van sitting on the ring road with its hazards on. Each one lasts a few minutes and belongs to whoever gets there first.

Three rules and that is all of it

You have to be in the city. You can see what is running elsewhere — the board says how many and where — but you cannot reach it from another airport. That is a reason to travel, not a bug.

Going for one spends it. Win or lose, the call is finished. There is no second go, and if it goes wrong nobody else gets it either. A call you could retry would just be a queue, and being beaten to one would cost nothing.

Some of them need a gun. The armed calls burn rounds exactly as a fight does. Carry a firearm with nothing in it and you cannot take those — carry no firearm at all and you were never eligible, so nothing is blocking you.

Somebody took it and they were not real

They were not, and they waited. Nobody who is not a player may touch a call until it has been sitting there for a while — long enough that anybody actually looking at the board has already had their chance at it.

So a call taken out from under you was one you were not there for. It exists so the board moves on a quiet night instead of filling up with things nobody ever came for.

The corner

Every city has exactly one, and one is the point. Holding it does not pay you anything.

What it does is make the board yours: nobody else moves on anything in your city until you have had a longer look at it, and everything you take there pays more.

Taking it off somebody is a roll, and it is deliberately close to even — the best player on the server can still lose it to somebody who started last week. When it changes hands it cannot change again for a while, so neither of you can spend the evening passing it back and forth.