Version 0.6.1 leads with a rule change: spells cannot touch a commander any more. They are a weapon against the army again. Behind it are a new three-part event chain, an upgrade preview on every card in the game, a camera that actually watches the fight, and another round of paint.
Spells fight the army
Aiming every spell at the enemy lord's face had become the way to win. The commander's health bar was simply the shortest road to the end of a fight, so the army standing in between stopped mattering. Commanders are now immune to spells, on both sides, through every path a spell had to reach one: single-target aim, the pad's target ring, area effects, whole-field sweeps and chain forks.
Long Odds is the one door back in, and it is priced like one. Two energy and a card for 5 damage aimed at the enemy commander and nothing else. It exhausts either way, so a miss costs you the card. Land the finish and the run keeps +3 max HP for the rest of the march. It houses in the Rogue's Gambit pack beside Coup de Grace.
Right-click any card to see its upgrade
Hold the right mouse button over an upgradable card and the upgraded face lays itself over the one you are pointing at: the "+" name, the greened numbers, the added keyword and its definition panel. Release and it drops. It is the campfire's before-and-after read, available everywhere a card is shown: your hand, the draft, the shop, the deck list, the reward pick.
The Brass Pilgrim
The events have a chain again, in three parts. A brass envoy three hundred years out of the salt with its lantern knocked crooked, the word it is still carrying, and the twelve-strong embassy that finally catches you up.
Chains no longer take their chances against the whole event pool: once you have met the first beat, the next one jumps the queue at the next event node you walk into, and the panel prints the chapter mark under the title. Two of the three beats are played on the lantern itself, a new minigame of nested brass rings where turning any ring carries every ring inside it, and the harder ring comes last.
The camera watches the fight
The deploy frame reserves room for a hand that tucks itself away the moment the fighting starts, which parked about 30% of the screen on empty ground and drew your units around 50 pixels tall. While the fan is tucked, the camera now re-centres the fight in the space the HUD actually leaves it, and a sustained brawl earns a push-in that tracks the scrum and eases back out as the heat cools. Your own pan or zoom stands the whole thing down, and Reduce Motion never sees it.
Every boss now gets the fly-over, not just the ones on wide fields, centred on the lord with its beats lined up against the taunts. The wide boss field is gone; each boss has a lane layout cut for it instead.
New paint
- Twenty-three spells got bespoke scenes. These were the last cards still wearing icon blow-ups from the June generation, thin symbolic sketches in an older language than the rest of the set. Slimify, Big Bang, Thunderclap, Exhume, Dark Pact and eighteen more now have their own painted faces.
- The slime pack lives in a slime world. The pack and the Slime Lord's own cards were rebuilt as full scenes with tide depth and colour accents, and the pack's power and spell cards moved in with them.
- The barricades are buildings. The Barricade is a rickety wall with real windows and the Spiked Barricade got the gappy pass its plain cousin already had. Both are ghosted to 55%, so a fight behind one is still a fight you can watch.
- Fifteen boon keepsakes were redrawn as the things they are, and the potion icons now sit inside the glass.
- Pharaoh's Curse is the mask that breathes the plague. The Spearman is a man braced behind a planted spear.
- A Growth unit visibly outgrows its own art, and its allegiance ring and shadow grow with the body instead of staying pinned to the size it was drawn at.
- The hive bugs got cute, and every adaptation now grows out of the body rather than floating beside it.
The road
- Every act now has exactly two merchants, one early and one late. A merchant used to be a weighted node type like any other, and that lottery left 61% of the paths you could actually walk past no merchant at all, with most of the ones that did appear crowded into the top four rows. Gold earned in the back half of an act had nowhere to go. Merchants are now placed after the map is rolled, weighted toward the nodes that the most root-to-boss paths run through. Paths carrying at least one merchant go from 39.0% to 61.4%.
- Only an act's first fight draws from the weak roster. A route can hold as few as two normal fights now, so a three-fight weak window meant plenty of runs never met the strong roster at all.
- The won-battle heal relics actually pay out. Triumphal Litter, Surgeon's Tent, Winter Stores, Camp Followers and Bounce Back all mended the run sheet and were then wiped a beat later when the run's health was re-pinned to the commander's body. The mend now goes onto the body, which is the thing that moves the bar, and the spoils screen replays it on the top bar.
Numbers
- The Elder Treant's Earthquake deals 3, down from 8.
- Big Bang splits the whole army at a point of health each.
- Slimify is a small area for 1 energy. Chrysalis seals a small area and molts 50% bigger. Reassemble aims at a medium area instead of one ally.
- The Gravity Wells are 0.75x heavy and 1.5x light.
- The Whispering Shelf's upgrade is Free Deploy.
- A full board still takes a summon, and the spawners hold rather than losing the body.
The run reads back to you
The end-of-run tally used to be nine stat plaques spilling onto a ragged second line, headed by a citation that could show a bare card name. It is one plate now: your favourite card wearing its real face, upgraded if that is the copy you played, the count beside it, and four headline numbers past a gilt divider. Click the face and the full-size card opens. The cut rows survive as honours instead. The unlock recap also waits for the parade to finish showing you each thing before it restates them, and only cards played from hand count toward your most-played.
Words
Cards now distinguish "allies" from "your units", and say which one they mean. An ally is any friendly body on the field; your units are the ones you deployed. In a solo run they are the same thing, which is exactly why it was easy to leave vague. In co-op they are not, and a card that heals allies does something quite different from one that heals your units.
In the browser
The browser build is current again. It ships one art style rather than two, because two sets of art do not fit under the embed's size ceiling, so the three Realistic boxes are not in its Settings. What it carries is what the game's own defaults resolve to: cartoon cards, painted scenes, cartoon arenas. Switching styles needs one of the Windows, Linux or Mac builds.
Smaller things
The battle camera can get closer than 2x. Auto-play holds to the battle and nothing else. The walkthrough runs backwards as well as forwards. A normal fight keeps the song that walked in with you. Mini Me's unlock card is dressed in your own commander. A blitz that took exactly one round says "1 round". The top bar counts a Leg, not a March. The Regicide's card burns on screen before the verdict lands. A commander that never flanks says so instead of reporting "Flanker-happy: 0%". Card art that fails to load no longer takes the card's frame down with it.