0.6: the whole game, redrawn

Written while the game was still called Warlords. It is Cardboard Conquest now, and the same game: that post explains the change.

Version 0.6 changes what Warlords looks like. The photoreal art that has carried the game until now steps back to being an option, and a hand-drawn cartoon style becomes the game: every card, every arena, every event illustration, every menu, drawn as one world in one style. It is the biggest visual change the game has ever shipped, which is why the version number finally rolls over.

If you preferred the photoreal look, it is still in the box. More on that below.

Every picture in the game is a painting now

• Every card face is a bespoke scene. A unit stands in its own painted world: the Broodmother has her lair, the Magma Magnate has his volcano, Balor has a pit to stand in. Spells and powers stopped borrowing stock flames and got faces of their own, player side and enemy side both.
• The paintings are alive. Card worlds carry living layers drawn in the painting's own ink: suns and moons roll over the Mummy's pyramids, magma runs, spiders scurry, weather moves across the Colossus's country. All 41 enemy lords now fight at home, each on a living stage of his own.
• All 30 arenas are drawn. Each region has its own war chart, rivers behave like rivers, roads meet water on actual bridges, and a volcano has a crater where a volcano keeps one.
• All 135 event illustrations are drawn, plus the five rooms the event pages sit in.
• Every screen backdrop follows: muster, campfire, shop, rewards, treasure and events. The map campfire is an actual campfire now, not a little flame glyph.
• The small art got the same pass. Every icon in the game was judged and the 31 that failed were redrawn, the last hundred crude field sprites were redrawn as the things they name, and the crown-jewel icons the card pop-out blows up were re-cut so they survive the enlargement.

If you prefer the photoreal look

The photoreal set did not go away. Three boxes in Settings bring it back, separately: "Realistic cards", "Realistic events and backgrounds", and "Realistic battlefield backgrounds". Each one flips live, mid-run, even mid-fight, so you can compare the two styles on the exact screen you are looking at.

The muster is a wheel

Picking a warlord used to be a row of panels. It is now a rotating wheel standing on real ground, and each warlord painted his own sign for it: five signs in five hands, in their own materials, instead of one typeface for everyone. A locked warlord shows nothing but his shape, and the five introduce themselves without handing you a paragraph.

New relics, new cards

• Four shuffle relics pay out every time your deck comes round again, so a thin deck that cycles fast finally has hardware built for it.
• Mini Me joins Giantkind: a pocket copy of your own commander, whoever that is this run.
• Ton's Log opens every battle by handing you a Log in a Bottle: a tree, corked.
• Bloodletting was rebuilt away from Bleed: a blood price, Sanguine, and vampires that collect on it.
• The Cutpurse is a crew now, and what they cut is purses. The Archivist is a clerk who un-burns a page. Shadowstep is a one-shot the upgrade buys back.
• The bug brood grew bodies worth fielding: the Instar line wears every molt it has survived, a fifth bug joined the hive, and the Wing Bug moves by percentage.
• The Wheel of Fate upgrade builds a bigger wheel, not a cheaper one, and the Great Wheel's face names the four new fates it adds. Double Down's Jackpot exhausts, and the wheel says so.
• Upgrades stopped mumbling: Black Cat+ brings a second cat, the Pterodactyl arrives as a pair with Cleave on the upgrade, K-9 Hound upgrades the pack rate rather than its running speed, and Sellswords hire one extra body per 25 gold instead of promising Free Deploy.
• Luck loads the Wild Die, and no card ships an "Upgraded:" line any more: the card just says what it does now.

The run reads back to you

• The end-of-run screen hands out superlatives, not just a report. The game keeps a run-wide tally of what each march actually did and names what stood out.
• After a fight, the game asks one question: five plates, "Way too easy" through "Way too hard". One tap, straight into the difficulty tuning pile.
• The unmodified run has a name now: the Standard March. And the ladder counts warlords freed, which is the number you actually care about.

The Compendium answers questions

• Card search understands rules. Find a pack by name, or a card by what it does.
• The hover magnifier became a proper Inspect plate, tooltips wait out a tunable dwell and bloom in instead of popping, and the long shelves build as you scroll so the pages open fast.
• Settings grew a "Replay the tutorial" button, so the intro is no longer a one-time offer.

The fight opens like a shot

The battle now opens on the whole arena and pushes in as the roads paint. A boss arrives in one camera move, not a cut and then a pan, and the lord bleeds into colour as the road closes on him. On the field itself, the Gravity Wells relic is finally visible, rails, dust and a wavefront you can read at a glance, and the lanes it re-tunes print their new weight: "Heavy lane", "Light lane".

Events play fair

• A coin flip is 50/50 now. It was quietly 55/45 in your favour, which is the kind of kindness that rots trust in every other number.
• The jigsaw got a varnish dial and a last-five-seconds alarm, and clearing it prints how much time you had to spare.
• The jump rope is yours now: your own commander does the jumping, and the trolls turning the rope got rebuilt around a crank you can actually read.
• Events that charge a percentage of something now quote what it costs in real numbers, and two events that never earned their place, Court-Martial and the Ring of Toadstools, are gone.

Controller

The pad's free-aim reticle is composed from the packs you drafted this run, B cancels the thing it is pointing at, a controller picked up mid-game keeps the screen you were on, and the focus ring now traces plates the way they are actually cut instead of drawing boxes around them.

Co-op

A long list of co-op repairs shipped in this range: the joiner sees the front coming down the lane, reads the same boss phase the host does, keeps their own hive census, and sees what a death leaves on the field. A co-op run can be resumed where it stopped, co-op and solo keep two separate saves, and the party divides a boss's spoils together.

In the browser

The browser build carries 0.6 now too. To fit under the embed's size ceiling the web copy ships the drawn art alone, so the three Realistic boxes are not in its Settings. Switching styles needs one of the downloadable Windows, Linux or Mac builds.

What's next

The art direction question is answered: drawn, everywhere, with the photoreal set kept as an option. Next is listening. The difficulty ballot above feeds directly into fight tuning, and the in-game feedback button remains the fastest way to reach me. If the new look changes how the game feels to you, in either direction, I want to hear it.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 11 August 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, or through the quill in game.