Your turn, step by step

A turn is five phases, always in this order. The player whose turn it is is called the turn player.

1. Stand phase#

Stand everything you control: every card in your base and every soul in your soul area turns upright again. Attacking, blocking, working and paying costs all leave cards resting; this is when that debt is cleared.

2. Draw phase#

Draw one card.

The player going first skips this draw on the very first turn of the game. That, plus the extra soul the second player starts with, is how the game balances going first.

3. Soul phase#

Move two souls from your soul deck into your soul area, standing. If your soul deck has fewer than two cards left, move whatever is there.

This is your economy curve, and it is entirely fixed: two souls on turn one, four on turn two, six on turn three, and so on up to ten. Since the soul deck holds ten cards, souls stop arriving after turn five — from then on your total is capped and the only thing that changes is how you spend it.

4. Main phase#

The part where you actually play. You may do any of these, any number of times, in any order:

• play cards from your hand by paying their cost in souls;

• use activated abilities on cards you control;

• rest a Pal to attack;

• once per turn only, rest three souls to draw a card.

Attacking happens inside the main phase: you declare a battle, the battle runs to its end, and then you are back in your main phase and can keep playing.

5. End phase#

Two things happen automatically:

• abilities that trigger "at the end of your turn" go off — this is when a Pal with Vigilance stands back up;

• all damage on every Pal and structure is set to 0.

That last line matters more than anything else on this page. Damage does not carry over between turns. A 1600-power Pal that took 1500 damage this turn is undamaged again next turn, so chip damage that does not finish a Pal off achieves nothing.

Then the turn passes to your opponent.

Source: Comprehensive Rules ver. 1.00 (30 July 2026) §7 “Game Progression”, and the Palworld OFFICIAL CARD GAME Play Guide.