15 August 2026 v0.3.5 Alpha brings one of the biggest gameplay expansions to MISFORTUNATE so far, introducing AI opponents, proper Single Player support, multiplayer lobby bots, a new Crystal resource, expanded crafting, and significant new automated gameplay testing behind the scenes.
Single Player functionality has now been enabled, allowing MISFORTUNATE to be played against AI-controlled opponents. Players can choose between four bot difficulty levels:
Easy
Medium
Hard
Extreme
Bot difficulty affects how aggressively and strategically AI players approach the game, including:
Purchasing Units
Upgrading owned Units
Managing Token reserves
Participating in bidding
Making Town route decisions
Choosing Portal destinations
Evaluating spending opportunities
Higher difficulties are considerably more willing to invest, upgrade, bid aggressively and push their position around the board.
Bots aren't limited to Single Player. Multiplayer hosts can now add AI players to their lobby to fill available player positions, allowing games to combine human and AI participants. Each bot can have its own difficulty setting, meaning a single match can contain a mixture of Easy, Medium, Hard and Extreme opponents. This also provides much greater flexibility when there aren't enough human players available to completely fill a match.
Crystals have been added as a new player resource. Crystal balances are now maintained as part of each player's gameplay state and can be earned and spent independently from Tokens, Honey and Totems. The Player HUD has been expanded accordingly. Resource displays now include:
Tokens
Honey
Totems
Crystals
Crystals are displayed directly underneath Totems for both the local player and teammate information panels.
The Crafting system has been expanded with a new recipe: Craft Crystal - 3 Totems Players can exchange 3 Totems for 1 Crystal through the existing crafting interface. The Crystal recipe has been integrated into the normal crafting and resource validation systems rather than operating as a separate special-case mechanic.
The new gameplay bot system uses separate behavioural profiles for each difficulty level. Bots can independently evaluate:
Whether a Unit is worth purchasing
Whether an owned Unit should be upgraded
How many Tokens should be kept in reserve
How aggressively to participate in bidding
Whether to take the Town route
Which Portal destination provides the best opportunity
Whether sufficient resources remain after an action
Hard and Extreme bots make progressively more aggressive decisions, while Easy and Medium opponents maintain larger reserves and introduce more unpredictability into their choices.
A major new automated gameplay simulation system has also been introduced behind the scenes. MISFORTUNATE can now run complete headless simulated matches using deterministic AI players, allowing large numbers of games to be tested without requiring manual play sessions. The simulation framework can validate:
Board movement
Player resources
Tokens, Honey, Totems and Crystals
Unit ownership
Copper, Silver and Gold upgrades
Turn progression
Event deck behaviour
Town routing
Purchases
Bidding
Turn Order War payments
Player elimination
Invalid resource states
Invalid board positions
Overspending
Deadlocked games
Every simulation can use a reproducible seed, allowing a problematic game to be recreated exactly when an unusual gameplay state is discovered.
Automated multiplayer testing has also been expanded. Multiple isolated Godot processes can now run the same deterministic game state and compare their results to ensure each client remains synchronised. The testing framework can detect situations where:
Clients produce different gameplay states
Resource totals diverge
Player positions disagree
Game state becomes non-deterministic
A match reaches a state where progression is no longer possible
These systems are primarily development tools, but they provide significantly stronger protection against multiplayer and long-match gameplay problems as development continues.
Additional validation now checks important gameplay invariants throughout simulated matches, including:
Permanent player IDs remain valid
Board positions remain within the valid board structure
Resources cannot unexpectedly become negative
Unit ownership remains consistent
Upgrade levels remain valid
A valid active player exists while a match is running
Turn Order War winners correctly pay their individual committed bids
Event deck progression remains valid
Deliberately invalid actions are also injected during testing to ensure the game correctly rejects impossible or illegal state changes.
Build compatibility tracking continues to be expanded alongside multiplayer development. Client/server compatibility checks remain in place to prevent mismatched multiplayer builds from connecting. Save and snapshot compatibility also remains separately controlled so gameplay builds can evolve without silently loading incompatible match state.
With Single Player and AI opponents now forming part of the main gameplay architecture, the next stages of development can focus increasingly on improving AI strategy, expanding Crystal mechanics, balancing the economy and continuing multiplayer playtesting. As always, feedback from playtests is extremely valuable - particularly around the differences between Easy, Medium, Hard and Extreme AI behaviour. Thanks for continuing to test MISFORTUNATE!