A fully voiced opening film, a coach who teaches you by letting you actually play your first three rounds, and narration across every lesson in the game — in English and Mandarin both.
TL;DR
- New: a narrated opening cinematic. Nine movements on the history of Valdhomir, and the last act points at your map — it forges the blade whose terrain sits nearest your homeland.
- New: the Game Walkthrough. Seven acts across your real first three rounds. Not a sandbox — you keep the victory points, the coin and the loot.
- Every lesson is voiced now. 309 takes across two languages, covering the film, the walkthrough, combat and errands.
- You can't get stuck. Sit on any one step for 45 seconds and the card grows a way past it.
- "Birth city" is now your homeland — and the whole chooser was rebuilt around a single card and a hand of fourteen tabs.
- The Claim button was invisible. Gold on parchment measured 1.05:1 against its own background. It's green now.
- Teleports were charging you twice. A minor action, plus the arrival's major, on two separate counters.
- Teleporting made you vanish in multiplayer. Other players never heard about it. Nor about caravans, or joining a fight.
- Trading a magic sword you were wielding left you holding a weapon you no longer owned — with your own smithed blade dead underneath it.
- New foe: the Pinchkin, lurking in ponds.
The Prologue
Nine movements, 133 seconds, fully voiced.
- The Warlords — and Nocthollow, their seat.
- The New Craft — the four fighting classes, by their emblems.
- The Uprising — the surge, and the shattering.
- The Long Peace — what got built on top of it.
- The Sorcerer — a figure in the deeps, and a blade.
- The Corrosion — the cut, the stain, the consuming.
- Your Charge — your home, and the blade nearest it.
- The Five Proofs — the five aptitudes you'll be measured on.
- The Call.
Movement VII is yours specifically. It finds the element whose terrain lies nearest the homeland you picked and forges that blade — so the film hands you off pointing at the ground you're about to walk. And the rot in movement VI never takes your own city, whichever one you chose.
It plays on a new single-player game and never on a load. First time through it doesn't skip — after that, it's yours to skip.
The Game Walkthrough
Seven acts, across your genuine first three rounds. It replaces the old city and board tours entirely.
There's no sandbox, and that's the point. This lesson teaches quests, actions, rounds, coins, victory points, your bag, the board and energy — and every one of those is your save file. A practice copy would be a diorama: you'd finish it and then start the real game from scratch with nothing to show, which is the worst possible answer to "I want to learn by playing."
So instead of protecting you from consequences, the lesson is the consequences. You really take Untidy Home. You really spend three major actions cleaning it. You really keep the Reputation VP, the coin, the string and the beads.
- Act 1 — every quest-giver in the city lights up, then narrows to one. Your first major action.
- Act 2 — what just happened. The round is held open while it sinks in.
- Act 3 — the world is changing. The blight arrives.
- Act 4 — risk.
- Act 5 — money and muscle. Hands you to the errand and combat lessons.
- Act 6 — crafting, minor actions, and the real shape of a turn.
- Act 7 — the tile page, road movement, and the send-off.
Act 5 gives the round back to you. The page unlocks, you spend whatever's left however you like, and act 6 only starts when a fresh round does. It's the first time the lesson lets go — which is what it's been building toward the whole time.
You cannot get stuck. Sit on any one step for 45 seconds and the card grows a way past it. There's deliberately no Skip button: a Skip teaches that the thing being pointed at is optional, and at 45 seconds nobody reads it that way — they read "something went wrong", which is exactly what it means.
Not interested? Say so. The offer comes back as a quiet callout on the city page whenever you want it, the same way the Sparring Area and Job Board do.
Everything is voiced
309 takes across two languages — 167 English, 142 Mandarin — covering the prologue, the game walkthrough, the combat lesson (with its own intro per fighting style) and the errand lesson.
Your homeland, not your "birth city"
The old wording made a permanent choice sound like a leash. It isn't one: it's where you hail from and where your reputation is seated, and the whole realm is still yours to roam. The screen says so now.
The chooser itself went from fourteen cards stacked edge-on to one big card and a hand of fourteen tabs.
- The hand is also the comparison table. Four bars on every tab — coins, knowledge, boosts, peace — scaled against the whole realm, so you can read who's richest and who's best armed without opening anything.
- Rivals are words now, not numbers. FEUD, TENSE, UNEASY, STABLE. Worth knowing: Enfeir and Zinzibar sit at a blood feud — a coin flip every check. Nothing else in the game comes close.
- That percentage finally says what it is. It's your chance of a peaceful round. It used to be an unlabelled number, and internally it was named after the exact opposite thing.
- Sorting by Combat now sorts by strength instead of alphabetically by style name — which had Benfriege leading for no reason you could see.
- The Claim button was camouflaged. Gold on parchment measures 1.05:1 against the card behind it — the same brightness. It's deep green now, and it turns red when it's asking you to confirm.
- Every hero renders at the same size at last. The old code assumed one canvas width; the actual art runs from 394 to 1048 pixels wide.
Multiplayer
- Teleports were charging you twice. Arriving somewhere is what costs you a major action — but the teleports were also spending a minor by hand, on a separate counter. Reported as "the tablet cost a major action instead of a minor".
- Teleporting made you disappear. Reported: "if I teleport from Tamariza, other players don't know where I am." The moves that never reached anyone else were exactly the interesting ones — Tamariza's teleport, the tablet, the Defenders Guild caravan, joining a fight, joining a skirmish.
Trading gear
- Trading away a magic sword you were wielding never unwielded it. You'd hand it over and keep swinging it — still carrying its Attack, with your own smithed weapon sitting dead underneath, because your ore bonuses only come back when you switch off the magic sword.
- Giving gear away could half-succeed in silence. It dropped the bonus and then cleared the slot, and if anything went wrong in between you kept the gear and lost the bonus. That is exactly the reported "my weapon boost vanished but I still had a weapon".
World and fixes
- New foe: the Pinchkin. A low-level pond dweller, levels 2-8.
- An errand now starts where you clicked. The moment a run builds, anything that isn't street becomes a wall — and a hero standing outside that could never move again.
- The defence ring grades you against the circle it actually drew. It didn't, before.
- Overlays keep their own clicks. No more clicking through the Journal onto the board underneath.
- The Knowledge screen stops pointing you at trainers who'd turn you away once you're past their level ceiling.
- Plus a failed library reading, an old book, and cleanup on the combat ring.
Known limits — we'd rather tell you
- One trading bug is still open. A player reported a traded weapon never arriving. We found and fixed two real bugs near it and built a two-player simulator to hunt it — and still could not reproduce that exact symptom. If it happens to you, we want to hear the details: what you were trading, to whom, and whether either of you had a weapon already.
- The prologue is unskippable the first time. Deliberate, but we know it's a strong call. It runs 133 seconds. Tell us how it feels.
- The homeland chooser has no sound yet. The cards deal in silence; the claim borrows an existing effect.
- You still can't browse the homeland cards while waiting for other players. The hand only deals once everyone has arrived.
The whole front door of this game is new. If any part of it talks down to you, talks too long, or leaves you unsure what to press — that's the feedback we want most.
See you out on the road.