Big news – the Open Playtest is live and anyone can pull up a chair this time. You told us where the game confused you, where a run dragged, and where it just didn't look as good as it should – and we spent the time since working through that list.
We went back to the first minutes of the game and rebuilt the tutorial flow. The steps follow each other in a sensible order now, the opening fights are paced calmer, and the core mechanics arrive one at a time instead of all at once.
The bigger fix: rules slides you can open at any point in a run. Forgot which suits answer what, or what a demon is currently doing to your hand? A couple of clicks and you're reading the answer instead of guessing.
Because the complaint was never really "the rules are bad". It was "nobody explained them". That's the part we went after.
We're still polishing how a match feels moment to moment. A batch of animations and effects got an update so that actions land with more weight and read faster.
The clearest example is the demon buff animation. Old version, new version, same moment – that comparison does a better job than any paragraph we could write here.
The rework wasn't only about fights. After the test we looked at the shape of a full run and cut the length of the acts – then filled the space we freed up with more events and more choices. Less empty walking between encounters, more decisions per minute.
The act maps themselves got redrawn too, biomes and tournaments alike. It took a stack of iterations to land on the current version, and a few of the rejected ones are honestly too good to keep in a folder – so we're showing the search, not just the result.
💎 Polishing Every Little Treasure
Getting ready for a playtest isn't all systems and structure. We're also going through the art by hand, one element at a time, and relics were the latest pass.
A chunk of them got redrawn to sit better in the game's overall style and to read more clearly on the table. Small stuff on its own. It adds up fast.
That's the batch. Open Playtest is live now.
Add the game to your wishlist and follow the page so the doors don't open without you 🃏
See you in the Kingdom of Fools ✌️