The New Dawn is marching on your portal. You are the cult that has to keep it open.

Break of Dawn is a tower defense where the whole army comes out of a deck. Every card places a building on the hex board, and the shop you buy from is your own deck laid face up. Buying is drawing.

Kill them, or take them alive

Souls come from kills and upgrade towers. Sacrifices come from bodies dragged off the road into a pit, and Sacrifices are what pay for ranks. But an Acolyte cannot grab a healthy enemy. You have to hurt a target and then stop shooting it, so the two things you want from everything walking past you are in direct conflict.

Choose the army that comes for you

Between waves you take one of two roads. The safe road runs the wave as written. The hard road brings 50% more bodies at 50% more health, halves your income, and pays a rare tower only if you clear it without losing a single life. Either way, the road you take drafts an enemy type into this act's roster, and every tenth wave fields the entire roster at once behind a boss. You are building the horde that comes for you.

One crown per run

Towers rank up to five, but the last rank is board to board only: two of the same tower, both fully upgraded, both committed to the same branch, fused for 110 Sacrifices. Crowning renames the tower and changes what it does. It also seals that card for the rest of the run. Every other copy caps at rank four and it stops appearing in your offers. One crowned tower of a type, per run, and you cannot take it back.

Losing buys you ground

Ten lives. Lose them all and the run does not end. The map grows a new segment behind your portal, your lives refill, your board and your deck survive, and you re-fight the wave that beat you with more room to work in. Three times.

What is in it

• 19 buildings across four damage types, each with a nine-slot upgrade tree and its own art and name at every rank

• Four cults to play, including one that brings a smaller deck where every card already starts at rank two

• Molten ground that only three towers can build on, and that pays them more the deeper into it they sit

• Wave modifiers from wave eleven: twice as many at half health, nothing capturable, and worse

• A board generated per run, seeded down to where the lava falls