Cardboard Conquest: Deckbuilding Autobattler
Cardboard Conquest is a roguelite deckbuilder-autobattler fought on a desk. Draft your packs, play your cards onto the board, and watch a paper army fight it out. Climb the war map, break the bosses, take the crown, solo or in online co-op with up to four warlords.
Coming to Steam Early Access in March 2027.
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I read everything in there.
You drop each card straight onto the battlefield, and a squad of soldiers, a spell, a trap, or a siege engine springs to life right where it lands. Wall a chokepoint, flank the line, screen your archers, and let the battle play out in real time.
Spells and statuses turn a losing clash. Rain meteors on a packed line, then stack Poison, Bleed, Fragile, and Charm until the enemy melts before your commander ever takes a hit. 281 pins and a 34-potion belt bend the rules further, every run.
Every run opens with a draft: 3 themed card packs out of 22. Armored legions, spider broods, walking bombs, con artists, love sorcery, splitting slimes, rising ghosts. Together they become your entire card pool. Even your commander is assembled from the packs you pick, so no two runs look or play the same.
Every act boss hides a signature phase that flips the fight. Cut Rex Mortifer to half health and the dead rise; strike Verdy B. Queen and the whole garden erupts. Eight bosses across three acts stand between you and the crown, and forty-three named lords bar the road to them: slime tides and spider broods, con artists and brass colossi, banshee choirs and the Pale Rider. Each one fields its own army, fights its own way, and packs its own dirty trick.
March as a war council of two to four. Every warlord drafts their own packs and plays their own hand, but you share one battlefield, one map, and one fate. Vote your route, suggest picks in a friend's draft, scrawl battle plans straight onto the field, and hold the line together: the clash begins when every crown is ready.
The road between battles bites back. 133 hand-written events: haunted shrines, crooked gamblers, going-away gifts from Uncle Jim, and a wheel of fate that can crown you or curse you. Read the room, weigh the odds, and decide what your army is willing to pay.
I make Cardboard Conquest by myself, and I've spent a silly amount of that time on little things nobody asked for: the title sign that swings when you poke it, the cloth ribbon buttons that dent under your click, the letter that burns up in your hands.
Every screen leaves the desk the way paper would. The spoils get crumpled into a ball and tossed, the map falls back like a drawbridge, and the treasure room tears itself into confetti.
Finish an act and its page is sealed in wax and cracked open onto the next land. When you kill Rex Mortifer, a light traces the edge of the battlefield and the whole board drops through the table into the underworld for his last stand.
At higher Ascension, two lords can team up on you in an ordinary battle, their stages, signs and armies taped together into one fight. I made all of it with a lot of love, for you. Poke at everything, because there's a surprise in almost every corner.
Win or lose, every march unlocks more: new packs, new cards, and new pages of the compendium.
A script counts every number on this page out of the build on each deploy. Uncle Jim is also in the box.
Community
Come say hi
I run the Cardboard Conquest Discord myself. It's where to find people for four-player co-op, tell me about a bug, or suggest what I should build next.
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