0.7.17: AI warlords take a seat at the War Council

10 October 2026 Version 0.7.17 12 min read

The War Council on its cardboard desk: the host's King and a friend's Boxer marked Ready, the Mummy seated as an AI warlord called Bottlecap, and a fourth AI seat shown as a black silhouette over the words Random warlord.

0.7.17 came out on 2 October and never got its own post, so here it is. It puts AI warlords at the War Council: a co-op host can now fill an empty chair with a warlord that plays its own run, close a seat, or kick a player. Deaths leave cut paper on the board instead of drawn stains, summons arrive in a puff of paper, the merchant has a second side, Rex Mortifer's last stand has a graveyard of its own, and four units and three lords were drawn again. Everything here is in the build you have now.

AI warlords at the War Council

Every seat at the War Council now has a mode, and the host sets it. An open seat waits for a friend. A closed seat is taped shut with a strip of card, so a party of two stays a party of two. An AI seat holds a real warlord with nobody behind it.

The War Council on its cardboard desk: four seat cards in a row. The host's King is marked Ready, a friend's Boxer is marked Ready with a Kick button under him, an AI warlord called Bottlecap stands as the Mummy with a Remove AI button, and the fourth seat is taped over with a big cross and the word Closed, with a Reopen seat button

An AI warlord plays a whole run of its own. It drafts its own packs, takes a gift at Uncle Jim's send-off, claims its spoils, shops, rests or forges, opens its chests, answers events and takes its own boss relic, once per stop, the way a player in that seat would. In a fight it is dealt its own hand and plays it into its own lanes, drinks its mending flask when its commander is hurting, throws a flask a turn from the second round on, and readies at the end of the turn like everyone else. It never votes on the map or on an event and nothing ever waits for it.

You choose its warlord with the arrows on its seat, or leave it on random, which shows the whole roster going past in silhouette. You can also pick the packs it drafts, or let it draw them.

The same table with two AI warlords seated: Bottlecap as the Mummy with one chosen pack and one random, and Paperclip shown as a black silhouette over the words Random warlord and Random packs, beside the host's King and a friend's Boxer

The table reacts as people come and go. A warlord stands up off its base when somebody sits down, the Ready stamp comes down and the warlord cheers, a kicked figure is tipped off its card, and when everyone is ready the whole row cheers and the Start seal breathes. Poke a seated warlord and it answers you. The slip under the banner says who the table is waiting on. Pressing Start lays the word across the table, sounds the horn and has every warlord cheer before the screen changes.

Kicking takes two presses. The player is told they were removed, their chair is freed at once, and they cannot rejoin that session.
Mid-march: if an ally drops out, the disconnect dialog offers to hand their warlord to an AI, and Settings has a new Party page that lists who is here, who is away and who is an AI, with the host's Kick and Add AI.
Resuming a co-op run brings the party back in the seats it was saved in. It used to put a nameless King with no cards in the first chair and move everyone else one seat along. A save that already had that King in it heals itself when it loads.
An unclaimed warlord in a resumed party can be claimed by a friend or handed to an AI.

What a death leaves behind

A unit that died used to leave a translucent shape with a pen line round it, or a pile of grey low-poly rocks. Those were drawings in a game where nothing else is drawn any more, so they are paper now, cut and lit like every standee on the board.

Blood is a pool: a dark red sheet with a slow, swelling edge, a lighter sheet on top that stops a little short so a dark lip shows all round, and a sliver of shine that says it is wet. The first version was a splatter with arms and loose drops, and it read as a splatter, so it was cut back to a pool and made darker.
Ooze is a fat round puddle of the same two sheets, with pale bubbles in it.
Rubble is a heap of board offcuts with a visible side, a couple of them cut from the body's own colour.
The pool springs out from under the body and the loose pieces are thrown from it, tumble and land, each with its shadow under it. Reduce Motion lays them down where they would have landed, without the throw.
Deaths on one spot near the edge of the board now merge into one pool. They used to stack as separate rings.
A body dying in a slime puddle no longer becomes part of the slime.

Summons got the same treatment. A unit used to arrive in a burst of sixteen bare white squares, and the burst went off at the wrong spot, up to a couple of hundred pixels to the right of anything summoned on your half of the board. It is now a puff of scalloped cream paper curls with kraft undersides, pressed out from under the stand and rolling outward, with a few chads thrown up off the feet. It goes off where the unit is actually drawn. A unit that leaps out of a portal gets a smaller puff when it lands, and both warlords get one as they land at the start of a fight. Nothing puffs before the board has been laid, so pieces built with the field no longer puff over the bare desk.

Four units, drawn again

The Goblin Brute and the Goblin Warboss were drawn again from a blank sheet. The Brute is one of the horde now, with their hooked profile on a heavier jaw shut on a mouthful and two tusks behind the lower lip. He carries a sawn-off fence post for a club and holds a bigger roast on a longer bone. The Warboss bellows into a trumpet held up in front of his dropped jaw, and his near arm comes off his own shoulder instead of out of his armour.

The Glass Lancer and the Bloodhorn Berserker both carried their weapons across their bodies, which made them read as standing guard. The Lancer now holds its lance level over its helm, wound up for its one blow. The Berserker was redrawn from scratch: his horns grow from the top of his skull, not the middle of his face, he charges stooped with the horns leading, and the axe trails behind him at the hip.

Four units in 0.7.16, above, and now, below, on kraft paper: the Goblin Brute goes from a spiked club and a clenched grin to a fence post club and a drumstick, the Goblin Warboss gets a brass trumpet held up to his open mouth, the Glass Lancer lifts its lance over its helm, and the Bloodhorn Berserker becomes a stooped bull with horns from the top of his head and an axe trailing behind him

Three lords, standing the way they fight

The Avatar of Winter wears a grand rack now. His antlers were a short pair squeezed onto the top of his sheet. They now grow out of burrs on his skull and sweep back and up into crowns of points, and they turn with his head. His sheet was made taller to hold them, so his health bar, his portrait on the map and his Compendium page all fit the antlers in. The Long Dark, his second body, has the same head.

The Slime Lord used to keep both arms behind his body. His near arm now hangs in front of his flank, out from under a swell of his shoulder, and bends from there when he swings, taunts or melts.

The Lost Witch and the Cursemonger also lead with the near shoulder now, and the Cursemonger's jinx-pole stands clear of his cloak. Their portraits were taken again from the figures you fight.

Rex Mortifer's last stand

Rex Mortifer's two phase breaks used to borrow the ossuary every bone lord shares. They now have a set of their own, built of printed bone: a spine along the top of the frame with ribs hanging off it, a graveyard that folds up along the foot, the dead coming up out of it on the slam, souls rising off the graves, a storm of finger bones, and a crown of ribs round his feet. The souls and the thrown earth go up behind the dead, never across a face.

Rex Mortifer's first phase break, The Dead Rise: the skeleton king in a crown and a blue and red robe holds up a hand with a blue soul on it, under a giant's spine and ribs, while skulls and bony hands come up out of a row of headstones along the foot of the frame

His second break, The Second Death: the same set, with blue souls whirling round his head and more of the dead up out of the graves

The merchant has a second side

The merchant was one picture. He has a second side now, the same man pleased with a sale. The first time you buy something on a visit he swings edge-on about his middle, the picture changes there, and he comes back round beaming with a coin held up. His shadow turns with him and he stays that way for the rest of the visit.

The merchant before you buy, a hooded man with a brown beard waving and holding an orange cloth, and after your first buy, the same man laughing with his eyes shut and a gold coin held up

A relic you buy now leaves its shelf in one motion and flies straight to its place on the bar. It used to sit a little off its seal, puff up where it stood, pause, and then fly to a point beside its chip.

Spells and relics

Aiming a chain spell shows the whole chain. Flamechain, Lightning and Delirium used to light only the unit under the arrow. The aim now walks the chain the way the cast will, leap for leap: every unit it would land on is outlined and counted, and the ground the bolt can leap across is drawn on the road.
Flamechain's upgrade branches. It used to buy one more hop. Upgraded, it now forks: the target, then 2, 4, 8 and 16 fresh bodies.
Magma Brute's upgrade is the fire travelling further. When Struck reads "Burn 1, Chain 1": whoever strikes him catches the Burn and it leaps on to the nearest enemy. His parting crack goes from Fork Chain 3 to Fork Chain 4.
Stacked chances add up. Several copies of Mitosis, Requiem or Virulence each rolled on their own, so three Mitoses could still leave nothing. Copies now add their odds: every full 100% happens for certain and only the rest is rolled. Three Mitoses give a Slimeling off every corpse and a second one half the time. The average is the same as before at every count.
Barkskin Balm plates the barricades it counted under its ring. The ring counted walls and the flask then skipped them.
An ally's once-a-battle relic fires once. On an AI seat, Deadman's Fuse went off again for every body its own blast felled, and once cleared a board of 140 Flurries in a single frame. The battle log now says whose relic felled what ("Pencil's Deadman's Fuse: 68 enemies hit, 34 felled"), and a relic that goes through a crowd is drawn as one wave instead of a burst per body, which took the worst frame of that fight from over a second to about a tenth of one.

Runs and the map

A run at a higher Ascension banks more pack experience: 10% more for each rung, double at Ascension 10. The bonus is named in the Ascension picker's hover and on the run summary's spoils.
On the map, roads your party can no longer reach fade out, ahead of you as well as behind, and they fade as your pawn sets off.
Gus eats Uncle Jim's check-in one bite at a time. He used to take the page in eleven strips off the right. Now he starts anywhere on the right-hand edge and takes about two hundred bites, each one next to his last, in a different order every visit, with crumbs and a crunch for every mouthful.

Fights

A lord's guard volley lays its own mark under each guard it will hit, or at the commander's feet, and each mark counts down to its shot. It used to show a ring, a footprint and a gold hoop round every guard at once. The warning ground under the volley now follows the lane and takes in the commander's whole yard.
In a fight against two lords, when one falls the camera stays on the frame it hands back and the fight picks up as it lands. It used to ease back in on the corner where the body fell and creep there on a frozen board.

Small things

The Audio page has a new checkbox, Mute when not focused, under Mute all. With it on, the game goes quiet when you alt-tab away and comes back when you return. From 0.7.18 it is on by default.
An event option's card or relic preview now sits beside the event page instead of against the edge of the screen, which matters on an ultrawide.

Phones and the browser

A card's lettering is cut once its size has settled, and the cut is kept. Every enemy play shown and every card lifted from the hand used to cost a frame of 55 to 90 milliseconds on a phone while the letters were recut at each step of the card growing. The worst frame of a card reveal went from 76 ms to 19 ms.
A lord's muster track is only redrawn when it changes, not every frame.

Off the game

The store page has a new trailer, cut from the current build and scored to the title theme, and new store art: a bright pop-up book with the King pointing you into the worlds of his Ascendant forms.
pbandgames.com now stands on the same paper sky, with the new trailer and the store's stills.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 10 October 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.