The deck is a deck of cards

Every unit, spell and curse is a playing card - suit and rank included. Rank sets a card's gold cost. Suit decides which Quarter it belongs to. The kingdom you fight over is built out of cards too.

Ten cards, no duplicates

Decks are exactly ten cards and you cannot run two of anything, so every slot is a real decision rather than a consistency tax. The deck cannot be changed once a run begins. That gives 847,660,528 possible Early Access decks, and more possible decks than there are people alive at 1.0.

Eight Monarchs, eight Hero Powers

Your Monarch is a King or Queen of one suit, and their Hero Power - usable once per turn, costing no deck space - is what shapes how you play.

Four Quarters, four identities

Each suit is a Quarter of the map with its own encounters, enemy pool and damage identity: Spades burn, Diamonds corrode, Clubs bleed, Hearts cure. Three ways to damage something over time, and one way to wash it off. Only one affliction can sit on a unit at a time, so applying a new one clears the old - burning your own bleeding target undoes your own work.

Runs that end

Your Monarch's health does not reset between battles. The boss is not marked on the map and never spawns within three nodes of the entrance. Losing your Monarch ends the run.

A map dealt fresh

Eight map layouts, each dealt fresh: encounters are drawn at random from the Quarter's pool, the boss hides in one of the final nodes, and backtracking re-rolls a cleared room into a new fight, a rest, an event, or nothing at all. That is 1,105,920 distinct starting maps per Quarter.

Monarchy Skills

A permanent skill tree at the Citadel that grows from finished runs - won or lost. Losing is not wasted time.

The Bottomless Pit - the run that does not end

An endless descent beneath the Citadel, unlocked by clearing the Abbey. Each level down, its host plays a fresh deck built to be harder than the last - and the level number is the difficulty, so how deep you got is the whole score.

Nothing heals. A Quarter run restores you after every victory; the Pit does not. Ten levels on one health bar is what turns depth into a question of resources rather than endurance. Every tenth level is a cliff - a full rest, a banked resume point, and a skill point every time you reach one. Your deck is locked between cliffs and open at them, so the Forge is the reward for getting there.

The opponent is not a corrupted enemy. It builds from the same 52 cards you do, one suit at a time, and spends Monarchy Skill points down that suit's line as it descends - a card player building the Monarchy's own deck better than you did.

The Joust - the whole deck of cards, no campaign

A separate local versus mode, unlocked by finishing your first run. All 52 cards and all 8 Monarchs are open from the moment you get in - nothing in the Joust is earned, because its only gate is arriving at all. The campaign is a curriculum; the Joust is a sandbox.

Both seats are configured independently as a human or the AI, which gives three ways to play: hand-off on one screen with the board flipping between turns, one seat against the AI, or both seats AI as a spectate queue. Before the match both decklists are revealed and each player bans a card from the other's - and the banned card is replaced, not lost, so a ban costs its target a substitution rather than a card.

Play the Joust with a distant friend via Steam Remote Play Together - and they do not need to own the game. Both hands are open at the table by design, so nothing is hidden by sharing one screen.

At a glance

In Early Access today:

• One of four Quarters - The Abbey, with 13 encounters and a boss
  
• 40 collectable cards in the campaign, and all 52 in the Joust
  
• 847 million possible decks
  
• Two of eight playable Monarchs
  
• All eight map layouts - 1,105,920 distinct starting maps
  
• All five Monarchy Skills ranks, every node, all 25 of them
  
• The Bottomless Pit in full - the endless descent
  
• The Joust - local versus, plus Steam Remote Play Together

What version 1.0 adds:

• The remaining three Quarters - The Mines, The Graveyard and The Tower
  
• 52 encounters and four bosses in total
  
• All 52 cards collectable in the campaign
  
• All eight Monarchs - 15.8 billion possible decks
  
• Online lobbies for the Joust