Rules

Iron Court is a strength-sport meet. Two to four lifters, 15 to 30 minutes, three attempts per lift, and the bar only goes up.

The meet

Each player is a lifter working through a full competition, one attempt at a time. The lifter with the highest successful total when the meet ends wins. A meet is played in phases, one per contested lift.

Weightlifting edition

• Snatch, then clean & jerk.
• Three attempts each. Six attempts in all.

Powerlifting edition

• Squat, then bench press, then deadlift.
• Three attempts each. Nine attempts in all.

Your total

Your total is the sum of your best successful lift in each discipline. A missed attempt scores nothing; a heavier successful attempt replaces a lighter one.

If two lifters finish on the same total, the lighter lifter wins — as in the real sport.

Setup

1. Choose an edition

All players compete in the same edition. Weightlifting is the shorter game and the better first play.

2. Choose lifters

Each player takes one Lifter card. No two players may take the same lifter. Your Lifter card carries a passive ability that applies all meet, a signature lift, and a bodyweight class.

3. Bodyweight sets your opening hand

Lighter lifters are quicker and start with more cards; heavier lifters start with more Energy.

Your class is also your hand limit

The number of cards you start with is also the most you may hold. At the end of each attempt, anyone over their limit discards down to it.

So a light lifter carries more options all meet and a heavy lifter carries more Energy. That trade is live every round, not just at setup.

4. Build the decks

• Shuffle the support deck — Technique, Energy, Interference and Momentum. Deal each player their opening hand.
• Sort the lift cards into a pool per discipline, face up, so everyone can see what weights are available.
• Sort the lift cards into a pool per discipline, face up, so everyone can see what weights are available. The pool is a shared display, not a draw pile: you take a card to your platform for an attempt and return it afterwards, so two lifters can call the same bar.
• Set the Doubt cards and Energy tokens within reach.
• Put two dice where everyone can reach them, and give each lifter a scorepad sheet. You declare on it, so any scrap of paper works if the pad runs out.

5. Nobody goes first

Iron Court has no starting player and no seating order. Every round the order is set by what the lifters call, lightest bar first. You do not choose to lift last — you buy it by calling the heaviest weight on the board.

Cards marked Weightlifting only or Powerlifting only are removed from the support deck in the other edition.

Taking an attempt

A lift runs in rounds. In each round every lifter who still has attempts left takes one, and the order they take them in is decided by what they call.

1. Declare

Everyone declares at the same time, in secret. Write the weight you are calling on your scorepad and cover it.

Your declaration must be heavier than your last attempt in this lift. Weight goes up, never down, and once revealed you cannot change it.

You declare on paper rather than by taking a card, because the lift pool is face up in the middle of the table — reaching for a card would show everyone your weight before the reveal.

If you have attempts left but nothing you are willing to call, you may stop for this lift. You keep every successful lift you have made and you have not bombed out: bombing is missing all three, not declining the third.

2. Reveal

Uncover together. Sort the lifters lightest declared weight first — that is the running order for this round.

If two lifters called the same weight, the lighter lifter goes first, the same tiebreak that decides the final standings. If they are also in the same bodyweight class, the lifter with the lower current total goes first. If that is still level — which mostly means the opening round, when nobody has a total — roll for it.

3. The support window

Working from the lightest declaration to the heaviest, each lifter steps onto the platform in turn. Take your lift card from the pool. Before the dice, everyone may play cards.

• You may play up to two support cards on yourself, but no more than one Technique. Technique lowers your Difficulty; Energy pays for it.
• Your opponents may play Interference at you, raising your Difficulty or restricting what you can do.

4. Resolve

Roll two dice. Meet or beat the final Difficulty and it is a good lift — the weight counts toward your total. Fall short and it is a no lift: the attempt is spent, the weight scores nothing, and you take a Doubt token.

Return the lift card to the pool and hand the platform to the next lifter in the order.

5. The next round

When the heaviest declaration has been resolved, the round is over. Anyone with attempts left declares again. When nobody has attempts left, the lift is finished.

The clean & jerk

A clean & jerk is one attempt but two separate rolls, taken in order — and they are not equally hard.

• First, the clean. Roll against Difficulty −1 — getting the bar to your shoulders is the easier half. Fall short and the bar never leaves the floor: the lift is over and you do not roll for the jerk at all.
• Then, the jerk. Only if the clean was good. Roll again, this time against the full Difficulty. Make it and the lift counts. Miss it and the lift is lost, clean or no clean.

You will usually make the clean and find out overhead whether you have the lift. At Difficulty 8, roughly three quarters of failed clean & jerks die on the jerk.

Either way it is one attempt and one missed lift: you take one Doubt token, not two, whichever roll you failed.

Difficulty

Difficulty is the number you must reach on two dice. Apply modifiers in this order:

Difficulty never leaves the range 4 to 12. However much Doubt and Interference pile on, the bar can still go up — a lifter can always walk out and try. And however many Technique cards you stack, no lift is ever certain: the best any preparation can buy is 92%, roughly what a real opener is worth.

The three powerlifts

Squat, bench and deadlift resolve the same way — one roll against the Difficulty on the card. But they do not share a ladder. Each was tuned separately against real IPF results, so the three lifts behave differently even at the same attempt number.

The deadlift is the most forgiving opener and the least forgiving third. It starts at Difficulty 3 — the easiest opener in either edition — and falls further than the other two. That is exactly what the IPF data shows: real deadlift openers go up 94% of the time, and real third attempts land 43%.

The squat is the flattest. It opens hardest of the three and holds its odds better, so a squat third attempt is the most reliable place to chase weight.

The practical consequence: call the deadlift you are sure of, because the ladder punishes greed there more than anywhere else. Save the ambitious third attempt for the squat.

Energy & Doubt

Energy

Energy pays for your stronger Technique cards. You start with an amount set by your bodyweight class. Energy cards restore it, and some lifts return Energy when you make them.

Doubt

Every missed lift gives you a Doubt token, to a maximum of three. Each token adds +1 Difficulty to your later attempts in the same phase.

Doubt is what makes a bad opener dangerous rather than merely disappointing: the miss costs you the weight, and it makes the next two attempts harder as well.

All Doubt clears between disciplines. You start each new lift fresh.

Tracking it

Doubt tokens go on your Lifter card, where the table can see them. That matters: an opponent deciding whether to spend an Interference card needs to know what you are already carrying, and hidden Doubt turns every attempt into a question.

Anything small works if the tokens go missing — a coin, a plate marker, a spare card face-down. Keep them countable at a glance rather than stacked.

The Doubt card

Iron Court also includes a Doubt card for each player, printed with 0, 1, 2 and 3 around its four edges. Set it beside your Lifter and turn it a quarter-turn clockwise for every token you gain, so your current count always reads upright at the top.

It replaces the tokens entirely, so the only loose pieces in the game are the dice. It is also harder to knock over and easier to read across a table — you see a printed number rather than counting a pile.

The cards

Lift
The weight you call for. Carries a weight in kilograms, a Difficulty, and often an effect that triggers on a make or a miss. Taken from the open pool, not from your hand.

Technique · 20 cards
Lowers your Difficulty. The cheap ones are free; the strong ones cost Energy. Some apply to one lift only.

Energy · 12 cards
Restores Energy, and sometimes removes Doubt or draws cards. The fuel for everything else.

Interference · 8 cards
Played at whoever is on the platform. Raises their Difficulty, forces a discard, or locks them out of a card type. You may hold at most three.

Momentum · 8 cards
Never played. Held in hand and triggers on its own when its condition is met — a run of makes, or a run of misses.

Lifters

Your Lifter card is not just a name. It carries a passive that changes how you play the whole meet, and a signature lift only you can attempt.

Passive abilities

Passives apply automatically. Some are always on, some fire once per phase, some once per meet — the card says which.

Signature lifts

A heavy attempt with an outsized reward, available only to its lifter. It sits in the lift pool alongside the standard weights.

Bodyweight

Your class sets your opening hand and Energy, and it breaks ties at the end. A light lifter competing against heavier ones is playing for the tiebreak as well as the total.

Ending the meet

The meet ends when every lifter has taken all three attempts in the final discipline. Add each lifter's best successful lift in every discipline. Highest total wins.

A lifter who bombed out of any discipline has no total and cannot place. If every lifter bombs out, nobody wins — which is exactly what happens at a real meet. Ties go to the lighter lifter.

Bombing out is not elimination

A bombed lifter keeps competing. You take your remaining attempts, you can still take the best lift in a discipline, and you still hold Interference to spend on whoever is ahead of you. What you have lost is the total, and with it any chance of placing.

This is how a meet works. At most competitions a lifter who bombs the snatch carries on into the clean & jerk and can still win that lift. Only at the sport's biggest international meet does a bomb-out end your day entirely.

Best lift

When the meet ends, note the heaviest successful lift in each discipline. It counts for nothing — the total decides the meet — but a real competition gives a best-lift award alongside the placings, and someone who bombed out can still take one.

Bragging rights. Which, at a meet, is most of the point.

Two-player meets

Interference is sharper with two: every card you hold is aimed at one person, and they know it. Expect a more aggressive game than at four.

Running a clock

Optional. Use it at a meet, in a tournament, or any time the table has a player who thinks for a living.

Real competition runs on a clock, and adopting it changes how Iron Court feels more than any other optional rule: attempt selection stops being an optimisation problem and becomes a decision made under pressure, which is the experience the game is about.

The real rules

• Weightlifting. One minute from the moment the bar is loaded to the start of the attempt. Two minutes if you are following yourself, taking consecutive attempts. Ten minutes between the snatch and the clean & jerk.
• Powerlifting. One minute from the calling of your name to the start of the attempt, forfeited if you exceed it. A further minute to declare your next weight once the lights are shown.

In Iron Court

There are two clocks, as there are at a meet. One minute to declare, run once for the whole table at the start of each round. Then one minute per attempt, from stepping onto the platform to the dice leaving your hand. Opponents declare Interference inside the attempt clock.

• Fail to declare in time and you are out for that round — no attempt taken, no Doubt gained. The bar does not wait.
• Run out on the platform and the attempt is forfeited. It counts as a no lift: you take a Doubt token and the attempt is spent.
• Between disciplines, take a break. Energy and Doubt reset as normal.

Any timer works (a phone will do). Four lifters, three attempts each, caps a clocked weightlifting meet at roughly twenty-five minutes of platform time. Don't use a clock for asynchronous play — it makes that format impossible.

Card interactions

Seven cases where two cards meet and the cards alone do not settle it. Everything here follows from four principles, listed at the end — if something new comes up, work from those rather than looking for another special case.

Perfect Setup + Early Pull

They never both apply to the same attempt, in either order. Play Early Pull first and Perfect Setup is blocked like any other Technique. Play Perfect Setup first and Early Pull may still be played, but Perfect Setup's own restriction cancels its −2. Either way you get −3, not −5. The two are alternatives, not a combo.

Clutch + Comeback Kid

Both fire, and Comeback Kid reduces the Doubt that Clutch can use. Holding both is worse than holding either alone. This is intentional: Clutch rewards you for being in trouble, Comeback Kid gets you out of it. A player chasing the Clutch payoff should not also be shaking off Doubt.

Rattled + Comeback Kid

Comeback Kid replaces the normal Doubt gain. Rattled's extra token still applies. Net result: no change.

Comeback Kid says "instead of gaining one" — singular. It answers the ordinary miss, not everything that could add Doubt to it. An opponent who spent a card specifically to pile Doubt on you gets something for it. You end level, but Comeback Kid is spent for the phase.

Rattled + Bar Path Control

Bar Path Control prevents the normal token. Rattled's extra still applies. Net +1 Doubt. Same principle as above, and the two must be consistent.

Focus + Red Light

Focus must be played during the support window, before any dice are rolled. Once the roll happens nothing can be cancelled.

This is the general timing rule rather than a Red Light special case: the support window closes when the first die leaves the hand. It also means Focus is a read, not a reaction — you spend it on the guess that Interference is coming, not after seeing a bad result.

On a Roll + Iron Will

After make, make, miss — neither applies. Your make streak is broken and your miss streak is 1. Momentum tracks consecutive results only; a streak resets the moment the opposite result happens. There is no partial credit, and the two can never be live at once.

Training Block + Comeback Kid

Training Block counts your Doubt when it is played. Comeback Kid fired earlier, during the attempt, so there is one less token to convert. Not a conflict — just sequence. The practical consequence is that Comeback Kid makes Training Block worse.

The four principles

• The support window closes when the dice are rolled. Anything that modifies an attempt is declared before that.
• A card that prevents the ordinary consequence of a miss does not prevent an extra consequence someone paid for.
• Momentum streaks are consecutive. The opposite result resets them to zero.
• Effects that count something count it when they resolve, not when they were played or drawn.

Where the numbers come from

The Difficulty on every Lift card was set against real competition data, not by feel.

We analysed 405,539 attempts from International Weightlifting Federation events between 1998 and 2026, via the OpenWeightlifting project, together with 185,368 powerlifting attempts from IPF meets recorded by OpenPowerlifting. Every attempt in those datasets is marked good lift or no lift.

Iron Court is tuned to the midpoint of medallists and the full field — harder than an average competitor, easier than a world champion — because that is roughly who the lifters on these cards are.

• A third attempt is close to a coin flip. Not a long shot. Third attempts here sit at Difficulty 7 to 9, not at the top of the ladder.
• The clean & jerk fails more often than the snatch, and the gap widens on third attempts. Two rolls, with the jerk at full Difficulty, reproduces that.
• Success falls with every attempt in a phase. Partly the weight, partly accumulated fatigue. The Difficulty ladder carries the physical half; Doubt carries what a miss does to your head.

Sources: OpenWeightlifting, OpenPowerlifting, and Erdağı, Işık & Özbay, Scientific Reports 14:28076 (2024).