Power Tokens

Straight from Blue Manchu dev diary (needs cleanup):

Our talents are divided into levels which we just refer to by colour:

   Clear
   Bronze
   Silver
   Gold

In single-player, your character gains talents as they level up. At the start of the game, you have no talents, which means that you can only use items that don’t have any talent requirements (there are still plenty of these though). As you level up, you’ll eventually get your first clear talent. This allows you to use one item that requires a single clear talent to use. You can see where it goes from there.

In balanced multi-player we just pick a standard level and give you the talents that you’d have at that level.