What you can do in your main phase

Four kinds of action, in any order, as many times as you can pay for.

Play a card from your hand#

Choose a card, pay its cost, and resolve it:

• a Pal, structure or gear goes to your base and stays there;

• an event does what it says and then goes to the graveyard.

Paying a cost of ③ means turning three standing souls in your soul area sideways. Resting souls is the payment — the souls are not spent or discarded, they simply stay rested until your next stand phase. If you cannot pay the whole cost, you cannot pay part of it: the play does not happen.

Use an activated ability#

Cards in your base can carry abilities you choose to use, written with the cost in square brackets. Some cost souls; many cost a rest — "rest this card" is itself a cost, which is why a structure that works your Pals competes with attacking for the same bodies.

Attack#

Rest one of your Pals to send it at the opponent. A Pal can attack the turn it arrives — there is no summoning sickness in this game — but it must be standing, so a Pal that already attacked or is already working cannot go again. See Battle basics for what happens next.

Rest three souls to draw#

Once per turn, you may rest three souls to draw a card. No card is required; it is a rule of the game, printed on the soul cards as a reminder.

Three souls is expensive early — it is most of turn two — and cheap late, when your ten souls outstrip anything you have left to spend them on. Getting into the habit of using it on turns where you would otherwise float souls is one of the easiest ways to improve.

The order matters#

Because everything shares one pool of standing souls and one pool of standing Pals, sequencing is most of the skill in a turn:

• attack before you use a structure that rests the same Pal;

• play a Pal before you decide whether to pay three souls for a card, in case you draw something you cannot afford;

• if you intend to block on the next turn, count how many Pals will still be standing when you finish.

Source: Comprehensive Rules ver. 1.00 (30 July 2026) §8 “Main Phase Processes”, and the Palworld OFFICIAL CARD GAME Play Guide.