The menu has a new song, and it is the game's name. Uncle Jim, who walks you through the first act, was the last drawn face on a desk made of cut paper, and he is cut from paper now too. Around those: the relic pool's best card stops being free, Ascension 9 stops taking ten health off you quietly and starts putting two commanders on one mat, and every taunt in the game is written on its own stationery.
Cardboard Conquest takes the title screen
The menu theme is a new song, "Cardboard Conquest", written for the name. Warlords Rise, which held that spot since before the game was called this, is not retired with it. It drops into the general track pool and plays on like any other, so the shuffle still reaches it.
One knock-on you will feel before you hear the song: the boot card's sandwich bites in time with the menu theme's pulse, and the new theme is slower, 99 beats a minute against 138.5. The card holds about a second longer before it opens. A click still skips it.
Every track in the game is playable at the jukebox, which is at 77 songs now.
Uncle Jim is cut from paper
Every other face on the event screens is a cut-paper pop-up hero. Jim was a line-art cartoon squirrel-man, and he never sat right on the desk beside them. His portrait is now cut from the same stock, in a natural stance with layered sneakers instead of the turned-out feet the first cut had. The one file feeds his intro, the walk-up, the check-in, the send-off, the tutorial finale and the map's start marker, and a cutout of it is the pop-out on his card.
All fourteen costume props are re-cut in the same paper and re-pinned. The new head sits left of centre because the tail takes the right of the sheet, so every hat, every prop and every anchor was measured again rather than nudged.
His scene work moved with him:
- The finale used to cut to black and come back on the muster. It pulls back into the muster now, no black between, and the send-off stands on act 1's own land with Jim walking onto it.
- His boughs fork and breathe instead of holding still.
- His marker rings the thing it means, not the box that thing happens to fit in.
- He answers the deed you actually did, rather than the one he was still waiting for.
- His note is measured before it is put down, and it never parks on top of your hand.
- The brazier's instruction line gets its own slip of card to stand on.
- The road opens without promising to patch things up.
The relic bill comes due
Live pick data said the same thing four different ways: plus one max energy was the only decision in the relic pool. Every relic carrying it was picked 59 to 85 percent of the time no matter what was stapled to the other side. Two Curses, no gold, thirty max health, no potions: none of it was being weighed. So the bills change.
- Coronet of Rank cost two Curses and was picked 94 percent of the time. An auto-pick is not a choice. It costs four now.
- Waterlogged Satchel keeps its no-potions lock, and every potion put in front of you now costs 5 health: the shop's opening shelf, an event page for each flask its options dangle, and the belt you walk in carrying, poured out one at a time. Floored at 1 health, so it can never finish you.
- Eclipse Lens traded thirty max health. It stops anything mending you until the act ends instead.
Ascension 9 is a fight now, not a number
Ascension 9 was "max HP minus ten", which is the one shape of handicap a ladder should not have: a silent number, announced once and then never seen again.
It is the fused fight now. An ordinary battle on the road can turn out to be two commanders on one mat, both rosters, both corners, the torn-and-taped stage, both of them have to fall. It is the same fight the Masked Challengers offer, except nobody asked for it.
Ordinary battles only. Elites and bosses each lean on their own arena, their own phases and their own arrival, and fusing two of those makes a different fight rather than a harder one. The odds are a pity ladder: 10 percent on the first ordinary battle after a fused one, five points more for every battle that comes up single, and straight back to 10 the moment a pair walks out. So it is never a rung a whole march fails to show you, and never two in a row on luck alone.
Two places where being two of something read as one got fixed with it. A pair's map marker wore the Twins' split portrait, one picture cut down the middle, which says "one thing in halves"; it is a fan of two cards now, both off true. And each commander prints its own health instead of sharing one number that was the table's default twice over.
Every taunt on its own stationery
The red rubber-stamp ring is gone from the paper taunt. The pack's crest prints big in the corner of a letterhead band instead of small inside a circle over the last line, and each of the 21 packs has its own sheet: stock, ink, print and edge. Heartbreakers on pink with hearts and flowers. Draw and Order on a legal pad. Final Rites edged in mourning black. Behind You! a pale-inked note on dark stock. All 42 enemy lords have one matched to their theme too, from Rex Mortifer's runed vellum to the Kilnmaiden's crazed porcelain.
The margin ornaments then learned the sheet they are printing on. Runes on a mourning band were black on black; they step round the crest and inset past a band or a charred rim now. Slime drips stop short of the writing, wisps and cracks draw darker, Mum's stitches run the whole way round, and the wax seal tucks into the corner.
Paint on the King's Recruit and Archer
The Realm's two starting units were grey ramps dyed blue and green. They carry their own colours now: a Realm-blue tabard, steel kettle helm, plank shield and arming sword on the Recruit; a green hood and tunic, leather quiver and bracer, and a longbow at full draw on the Archer. The Ghost Archer had been sharing the Archer's drawing and keeps the old grey under its own file, because a translucent blue tint needs a grey to dye.
Elsewhere in the box: the tithe collector has his head back, and Sledge Hammarsson's mat dresses the ice around the lanes rather than under them.
Smaller things
- The aftermath page stacked its two pictures when a choice paid both a relic and a look, and it was so tall the page shrank its own words to fit: the epilogue read at 16px, the relic line at 12. They stand side by side now. Every word on that page is about 14 percent bigger, and the figure went from its 140px floor to 229.
- An event's marked-up half stopped printing in smaller type than the rest of the page.
- On a boss or elite arrival your warlord's sign was stuck down the moment the stage finished building, then hauled back out of the taunt bubble's way four seconds later. Two moves to place one sign, on the one beat that is looking at him. It waits for the fly-over to track home now and settles with his line.
- Grix's last fight was ending the round a wall-breaker unbuilt his barricades, because six fast bodies for two energy is the best card on Jim's road by a distance. That card is buried under the boss deck now, along with every id it can be wearing, so the fight teaches walls and lanes instead of ending early.
- Second Front says its piece in a ladder row's width.
- The Path's rim glows from under the banner rather than across it.
- The muster's dusk masks were deciding which side of a marker line was outside by probing, which is a coin toss on a line that wanders. It reads the winding now, and a driver samples the shipped answer on a grid fine enough to catch a dropped band two pixels tall.
These posts have a home now
Every update post since 0.5.56, twelve of them, is now readable at pbandgames.com/devlog, one page each, with an RSS feed. They still go out here and on itch, so nothing changes if this is where you read them.