August 2026 Major Update

Nine days since the last patch, and the tavern got rowdier. The Tavern Keeper
stopped hiding her difficulty inside the AI and put it on the table where you
can fight it. The Bards hired thieves. A merchant lord bought a blimp. And the
whole game now runs natively on Steam Deck (and Linux, for that matter), full controller
support, top to bottom.

Fair warning about the headliner: there is a kraken in the boss fight now.

The Kraken: the Keeper's fight, rebuilt

The old boss fight was hard for the wrong reasons — an overtuned AI board advantage
and a random deck. We rebuilt it as an arc you can read and race:

• The Keeper plays an authored House Deck now, and opens the same way every
  time: banking her early turns on economy. That's the tell.
• Her Summon Bank fills with the gold she can't store. Every rung it crosses
  escalates the fight. Starve the bank, race it, or fight what comes out of it.
• At the last rung she calls the Kraken: a multi-part boss unit with three
  tentacles that guard the body. Slam crushes a random unit — hers included.
  Lash batters your fortress. Squeeze grabs one of your units, holds it a turn,
  and throws it at your own walls.
• Tentacles carry the new Exposed keyword — you can attack them directly.
  Every one you kill weakens the body; kill all three and the beast itself is
  EXPOSED.
• The House Tally on her banner tracks the whole arc: the bank ladder, then
  the Kraken's health and remaining tentacles. Nothing is hidden.
• She has a voice now, three bespoke tracks, and the music pins its finale
  the moment the beast surfaces. She also screams at you. It's personal.

Nine new cards for the Bards

Two problems, two packages. The bards couldn't touch an enemy fortress — now
they have the Menagerie:

• Bramblehorn, Drawn by the Song — the new Devastating Strike keyword: attack
  a unit directly, and if it dies, the body is hurled into the enemy fortress
  for the victim's ATK.
• Rammy the Little Rammer — charges two enemy units on arrival, no
  retaliation. He never charges his own side. Be cool, Rammy.
• Piper's Lark — an Airborne clock that scries you toward your combo pieces.
• A Filthy Limerick — two damage straight to the fortress, draws a card.
  Three verses, two of them actionable.

And because a guild of scoundrels should steal things, the Heist arc:

• Vela Softstep, Dom the Distraction, and Trix, the Double-Take are thieves —
  their fortress hits build Prize stacks that pool across the crew and survive
  a thief's death.
• At three stacks, your next hit on that fortress cashes the score: it steals
  triple that hit's damage from the defender's resource vault. Whatever the
  vault can't cover converts to fortress damage at 2:1 — the payoff never
  whiffs.
• Magic Carpet Ride lifts a grounded thief over the blockers for one swing.
  Mind the fringe.
• Magic Mirror reflects your targeted Instants through the glass, amplified
  by whatever song is playing.

The Merchant Lord

• Treldon Manes, Merchant Lord Extraordinaire — an Airborne Legendary whose
  Aerial Bombardment drops aimed bombs on up to three targets, with splash. He
  also halves your other units' upkeep, and will not stop complaining about it.
• When his blimp is shot down, he bails out in a Golden Parachute — and comes
  back next turn piloting a 4/4 War Mech with fortress-punching Fist Cannons.
• Find him in run offers and the Quartermaster's stock.

Steam Deck: native, full pad support

• Spirefall now ships a native Linux build. Steam Deck and SteamOS run it
  directly — faster boots, no compatibility layer.
• Every menu, overlay, and match screen navigates on controller: a universal
  focus ring, a landing focus on every screen, LB/RB rails, and focus-trapped
  overlays that never strand you.
• The pad map: Y inspects anything on demand (tooltips when YOU want them),
  Select toggles attack-all, B always backs out exactly one layer.
• On Deck-height screens the fortress crest and commander pop out of the
  banner and overhang the battlefield — twice the presence without costing the
  board a single row. Ability gems compress to two-letter sigils; full names
  stay a tooltip away.
• This came out of eight rounds of on-device audits over the last week. If
  you play on Deck, we want to hear what still feels off — see the Discord
  link below.

The tavern beam

• The run map's HUD is now a carved oak beam within Tully's Ale Haus: the Journal, your Deck, and
  the Quartermaster's placard hang over the table, with your purse, charms, and
  fortress wear at a glance.
• Calling the Quartermaster mid-run now asks before taking your 10 gold.
• B/Escape on the journal, deck panel, or Walk Away prompt closes that
  overlay and nothing else — it no longer also quit to the menu.
• When navigating using a controller, tooltips are suppressed. Pressing 'Y' is your tooltip trigger

Balance: what changed and why

We run every change through overnight benchmarks — 300 boss games per tuning
cycle, four cycles this patch.

• Bards starter: Rammy, Piper's Lark, and 2× A Filthy Limerick in; Trazom
  Swiftheart, Drop your Guard, a Tavern Wench, and a Brown Note out. Measured
  result: bards fortress damage per game up 33% at elite tables and 59% at the
  Keeper. The reach gap is closing, and we will be actively monitoring.
• Treldon was tested in the Merchant Coast starter and cut: across twelve
  benchmark boss games at 7 Gold he was cast exactly zero times. A dead card in
  a 20-card deck is a nerf wearing a cape. He lives in the offer pool, where
  mid-run economy can actually pay for him.
• The Keeper's House Deck lost the Coastal Siege Canon — five to eight
  volleys a game was board-wiping slow factions before their plan started.

What we're actively watching

The Numbers:

• The Kraken now appears in 95–100% of boss fights (it was 19% for some
  factions in early tuning — the Keeper kept dodging her own mechanic). The only
  Kraken-less games are sub-turn-6 blitz wins, which is the correct fantasy.
• The Keeper still wins too often against Merchant Coast and Bards. The
  losses are the right kind now — the escalation package, not silent AI
  advantage — but the magnitude is wrong. Her assassin engine is the next
  tuning target.
• The bank currently fires the Kraken around turn 6 — earlier than the
  designed turn 7–10 window. We're retuning the rungs.
• Heist is brand new: we're watching cash-in rates and whether triple-steal
  is the right multiplier.
• Steam Deck UI scale: we're testing 1.15 vs 1.25 per screen on device
  before changing the default. Deck players — tell us how it reads.

Come argue with us

This demo improves at the pace it does because people play it and then tell
us exactly what annoyed them. That's the whole loop.

• Join the Discord: discord.gg/EQ7sMQk37q —
  patch discussions, balance arguments, boss-kill screenshots, and the fastest
  way to get a bug in front of us.
• Playing on Deck? We especially want your notes this week.
• And if the Kraken eats your favorite unit and you want to see where the
  full game goes — the wishlist button is right there.

Eighteen days, seven patches. There's a kraken in the tavern now. We take no
responsibility for what the Keeper does with it. Back to the Tavern!