Major Update! 2026-09-12

major update

A Wizard-Chess Tournament · build 25255312 · published

On SteamNotes only · this build shipped before we watched the app

Welcome friends!

A major update to the game has just been released.
We have been working hard over the last few months to bring you this new version and are excited to hear what you think!


Major Changes

A New Single-Player Game Mode - Puzzle Mode

This is a Wizard Chess game mode where your goal is to win the match with the least amount of resources used. Fewer moves, less mana and fewer spells cast will give you a better score.
Each puzzle has a leaderboard so that you can see how well you are doing against the rest of the community.
The puzzles have been designed with a best number of moves in mind and that has been marked as Par.
Achieving par will earn you a gold star, but if you are able to beat that, you could get a platinum rating! Though I suspect that it would not be possible on most puzzles, don't let it stop you from trying!

Card Art

The art of all 48 cards has been completed and you can see them in the game now.
It gave the game a real face-lift and I'm so happy to see it.

Thanks to our artist Katie for working so hard on these.

Balancing

A complete re-balancing of all the cards has been done.
This includes draw chance, cost, effects and so on.
14 cards were removed for being too samey and a limitation on random drawing now makes sure that you will only draw a maximum of 2 of the same card in a draw.

Tutorial

After watching some new players play the tutorial for the first time, I decided to rebuild it.
The wording was changed in many cases and 10 new tutorial beats were added.
There are still a few things that need more work, but I'm more satisfied with how it is now.

Menu Redesign

When we added the classic and single-player modes, the old menus were clunky.
So we redesigned how the menus interact and changed the layouts of many pages.We still have some work to do with tab orders on buttons and back button behaviors and will be working on that for the next release.We also dropped the pixel font because it was giving too many problems with different screen sizes and on the Steam Deck.
The new font looks nice and crisp now, I hope you like it!

Smaller Changes

Controller Support

  • Xbox controller support has been tested. I found and worked around an annoying Godot bug when using the Xbox Wireless receiver on Linux.

  • Xbox controller button glyphs should now show correctly when that family of controller is detected.

  • Nintendo style controllers can now individually be configured to swap the A/B and X/Y buttons so that you can mix different types of controllers.

Steam Support

  • Updated the Steam integration libraries to Steamworks SDK 1.65 to support new Steam hardware products.

Quality of Life Changes

  • Fixed an issue where you could not scroll the information banner when using mouse-over on a square or piece that has many spells cast on it. Now clicking selects the square and you can use the mouse to scroll. This still needs to be resolved when using a controller.

  • Names of spells (not just their effects) are now logged in the event log.

  • All match logs are now saved to disk. This allows you to send the log if you have a bug report and it is also used to prove to the game that you have a real solution for each puzzle.

  • There are now 11 total music tracks that cycle as you play.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed the "Favorite wizard" stat on the profile page to now show the correct value.

  • Discord button now works. Please join!

  • Capturing off a square now fires its exit effects.

  • The move preview now shows stackable spell casting correctly.

  • And many more small things.