High Tide, the water pack

High Tide is the game's first pack built around terrain. Its 20 cards flood the road with Tide Pools, which Slow everything that wades in, your own army included. Swimmers move faster in the water, and some of the pack's units heal from being Slowed.

• Landshark swims through the dirt, can't be touched by harmful spells, and deals double damage to Slowed enemies. It can be summoned onto any Tide Pool. Its flavour line is "Just when you thought it was safe to walk on the ground."
• The Kraken can only be summoned into a Tide Pool, and that pool never dries up while it lives. Its tentacles drag what they hit into reach.
• Whirlpool drags every enemy in a large area into its eye. Tidal Wave shoves them back toward their own commander.
• Bucket Brigade starts the pack: three fishers carrying the sea about in buckets, who spill a Tide Pool when they fall.
• Turtle Nest hatches three Turtle Hatchlings after 6 seconds and leaves a Tide Pool behind.
• Fish Out of Water turns an enemy into a Flopping Fish for 8 seconds.

Here four identical knights start level, two on a dry road and two on a flooded one. The driver that filmed this held the pool open longer than a card would.

The commander is the Tide Mage, whose head is a breaking wave with a small fish on the brow. There are three looks, and the Ascendant one, the Midnight Deep, stands in a dark breaker with glowing edges. The pack also has two Pack Paths, The Deep and Cold Current, a mastery achievement and its own song, "Further Up the Shore", a capstan shanty that swells into Celtic sea folk.

The Crash Dummy

The fifteenth warlord is a yellow test dummy in a seat-belt sash. His pin, the Crumple Zone, gives him 1 energy on the spot and +1 max energy for the rest of the fight every time an enemy breaks phase, so a boss with a lot of breaks is his best fight. The fights against the paired Masked Challengers don't have phase breaks, so the pin does nothing there.

His Stunt Dummies come six at a time and are Crash-Tested. The moment a break lands, each of them buckles in, and nothing can hurt, hex or move it until your next turn. You unlock him by living through 30 enemy phase breaks.

The Wedded

The sixteenth warlord is two warlords. You play the groom or the bride, and your spouse marches beside you for the whole run, played by an AI with its own deck, its own hand and a vote wherever a vote is counted. You each draft a pack from the same round, and both of you march with both.

Each half opens on 55 health. The groom leads six groomsmen and a Best Man, and the bride six bridesmaids and a Maid of Honor. If one of you falls, the other gets a phase break under a rose arch, with a banner reading For My Bride or For My Groom, and the fallen one comes back on 1 health if the other wins the fight. You unlock them by opening 25 treasure chests.

A rare kind ending for every lord

About one fight in twenty, your warlord charges in for the finishing move and then does something nice for the lord, who walks home. Gentle vows raise the chance and hard ones lower it. Every lord has its own version, and a spared act boss gets a verdict page reading BEFRIENDED.

• Simple Ton gets a bucket of water poured over his moss.
• Wynken is tucked into bed, and a paper sheep hops over the foot of it.
• Grix already wears a crown and is handed a second one to stack on top.
• The Grave Tide gets a folded paper boat on his foam, and the Broodmother gets a handshake.

Paper places behind the plain screens

Most of the screens that used to be a menu over a flat backdrop now stand in a place cut from paper, with things moving in it and a few rare surprises.

Winning. A won campaign ends on the capital's great day, in the land your three vows built, with that land's crest standing on the meadow as a monument in card. Each of the 27 governments has its own scene. If you wait, you may see a red paper dragon kite, or Uncle Jim going by in a balloon basket.

Losing. A lost campaign ends on the road home at blue hour, in the rain, with your army trudging past under paper umbrellas. Now and then a rainbow unrolls from the village to the lost field.

The acts. Nine lands behind the act maps are pressed in cut paper: Moonrise Valley, the Cinder Caldera, the Rootmire, the Bloomfields, the Calving Sea, the Road to the Throne, the Barrow Vaults, the Winterwalk and the Siegeworks. Watch them for a while. The half-built Colossus in the Siegeworks sometimes wakes up, looks around, steams at the ears and goes back to sleep.

Everywhere else.

• The pack draft is in a hall of arms, in place of the striped pavilion.
• The War Council meets on a muster hill with sheep, and a goblin sometimes pops up to plant a red sock among the banners.
• Events lay out on a desk at a crossroads inn, and a wheel of cheese sometimes gets away from the innkeeper.
• Card rewards are on the muster green with a recruiting sergeant and a queue of recruits. The Path of Evolution stands under a forked tree with a recruit on a rope swing.
• The vow room shows the land your vows will build.
• Five event settings (the old battlefield, the crypt, the chapel, the camp and the village) are cut in paper too, and the crypt has a ghost.
• Send Feedback lies on a cutting mat with a pencil, twine and paper offcuts.
• The burn screen moves to the yard behind the merchant's shop at night.

The credits now roll in a pop-up theatre with a paper audience. The man in the moon wakes to watch a rocket go up, and it sticks in his eye.

Everything else cut from paper

• All 100 achievements are cut from paper on coloured card, and every locked one is a die-cut recess.
• Every potion has its own paper bottle, and every pack has a new paper crest and aura.
• The slimes, Living Bomb, Cinder Sprite, Eater of Filth and the Growth seeds lost their cartoon faces for cut-card brows, lids and mouths.
• The Compendium is a made book, with cream text stock and oxblood cloth boards, on the battle's cutting mat.

World Champion, and the rest of Champions

Champions now has a World Champion tab for whoever holds the title. Post a build code in the #pvp channel on our Discord (pbandgames.com/pvp) and our bot, Herald, plays it against the holder on a real battle, best of five with the challenger on the left in games 1, 3 and 5. The winner holds the title and Herald posts the games. The title starts empty, so the first code in takes it unopposed.

You can also drag builds onto and off the table's bases from any direction, and clicking a council code or a build code copies it.

Also in this update

• The opening film no longer gets interrupted when loading finishes. The game used to pull you back to its own desktop if you had moved to another one, and the menu music came in at full level over the film.
• In co-op, the Ready flag is real cloth now. It unrolls on a dowel and you can shove it around with your cursor. It's gone once the fight starts.
• In co-op, a seat with a commander standing in front of it keeps its played cards beside it, not on top of that commander.
• Blood Moon's feeding on kills now applies to your units and not to commanders.
• A new gift in the Hive plays its upgrade on every Bug it reaches.

Known issues

• Sparing Haft while Hew is still alive still plays Hew's grief, with the "BROTHER!!!!" banner, even though Haft just walked home happy.
• A knight wading in a Tide Pool shows a snowflake for its Slow, the same mark as frost.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 30 October 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

The enemy lords play from their own decks

Until now every lord played a script. Each round of it named the cards the lord would buy and the turns it would cast on. A look at the board could swap one squad for an answer to yours, but the shape of the fight was fixed, so a lord you met twice played the same fight twice.

Now each lord plays out of a deck, the way you do. The deck is built from the lord's own cards: twelve for an ordinary lord, fourteen for an elite and sixteen for a boss, each card in it about as often as the lord used to play it. Every turn the lord draws a hand of five, one more for each energy above four, and plays the best set of cards its energy will buy, judged on the board as it stands. What it does not play goes to its discard pile, as yours does.

• A spell is weighed by what it would catch. A lord holding a blast plays it into a crowd of your units, and holds off while there is nothing under it worth hitting.
• An army short of shooters values them more. A lord with a line of bodies already down sends its archers and spitters in behind it, and one with only shooters standing puts a line in front of them.
• A lord with several squads of one unit already marching leans toward its other cards, so its army comes out mixed.
• Each of the two Masked Challengers plays its own hand and marches its units down its own roads.

A lord has exactly the energy it had before, and no new cards, bonuses or relics come with the deck. Over six test fights each, Grix the Goblin and the Pale Rider opened in six different ways and the Fire Devil in five, where the old fixed turns gave each of them two.

A first march, directed

A player's first march on a new profile is now a shorter act 1, laid out so the game shows what it has early. It is still a real run: the cards, the choices and the fights are real, and the fights can be lost. Every later march is as it was, and so are acts 2 and 3 of the first one.

• New Game goes straight to the pack draft as the King, with his own banner and no Ascension. Back on the draft returns to the title.
• Act 1 is seven rows instead of ten, and the chart's opening pan always starts on Wally, the boss at the top.
• The first fight is always Grix the Goblin, and he arrives on the entrance page the elites and bosses get, with a leap.
• The first turn shows two notes, Break their warlord and Drag a card to a spot. The note about 3 energy a turn waits for the start of the second turn, when the energy comes back.
• The next row is the Mimic, a treasure chest with teeth, which you can fight, feed or run from.
• After it every node is a different minigame: Trolls' Long Rope, Knucklebones with a Goblin, The Mason's Wager and The Sealed Grove.
• Then a fight or Simple Ton as an elite, a treasure chest that does not bite, a campfire or a shop, and Wally.

After Wally, won or lost, the first march stops for a short look up the road. The desk dims, a slip of paper unfolds reading "Still ahead", and three mounted prints of the game's own footage cut one to the next, each under the lord's painted nameplate: the Brass Colossus cracking the glass in act 2, Rex Mortifer dropping the field into the underworld in act 3, and the long zoom out to the galaxy, tagged "Zoom out in any fight". The music drops as the Colossus's claw hits the glass. Any press skips it after the first second, and it plays once per profile.

The lord's spells come on his turn

A lord's spells used to be placed and shown at the start of your turn, after "Your Turn" had gone up, so his card arrived in the middle of yours. They now go down on his own turn, right after his muster, and anything he casts on the spot lands before your turn opens.

This also fixes a fight that could stick for good. If a lord's card was shown big for the first time while Pact of Unknowing was asking you to pick a card to exhaust, neither could be closed. A card shown big can now be put away over that pick.

• When an enemy spell on a timer is shown big, its countdown sits over the card, the same "3.5s" its telegraph carries.
• An enemy card shown big for the first time no longer puts up its keyword tips on its own. They come up when you point at the card, so they stop covering the field.

The Lost Witch and her Storm Apprentice

The Lost Witch could open a fight by dropping Chain Lightning and Beguile on your commander before you had put anything on the board. Her charm no longer aims at your commander. On a bare board she holds her spells over herself on a clock and aims them at what you summon, and she spends Beguile on units it can turn.

Her army was two conjurations that both walk up and fight. She now has a back line: the Storm Apprentice, a pupil who throws lightning from her open hands. A strip of cut paper in the witch's storm ink strikes from her palms to her mark and hops on to a second unit. The witch puts a front-line body down first and the Apprentice behind it.

Champions: your friends' builds arrive on their own

The Champions table now fetches the builds your friends have finished. Anyone you have marched with in co-op, anyone whose build code you have taken, and anyone whose council code you type into Add is followed, and their newest builds are filed on their own tab when the game starts and when the table opens. A friend's build you removed stays removed. When builds arrive while the table is open, the tabs refresh and say whose they are. Our privacy page at pbandgames.com/privacy says what the relay sees and how long it keeps it.

A build also brings its gold now. The purse a march ended with is kept with the build and opens that seat's purse at the table, on either side, so its Sellswords hire out of it and the Dragon's Hoard counts it. A build saved before this update brings none.

Also in this update

• Spiked Barricade has Spearwall 4 alongside its Thorns 4, so a unit that charges into it loses its Charge bonus and takes damage back, and a Flanker that strikes it takes damage back too.
• The cards a Power hands you each turn (from Incubation, Unburied Cemetery, Marginalia and Pandora's Boon) now Exhaust when played, and Exhaust at the end of the turn if they are still in your hand. The card face and the keyword panel say so.
• The enemy commanders' sparks, spores and wisps now come off something drawn on them, where they used to drift round the face as a haze of scraps: the torch, the hot iron in the tongs, the witch-fire, the Fire Devil's crest, the Myconid's palm, the soul in the Lich King's hand. The Treant drops leaves from his canopy, green or autumn once he wakes, and cut gold stars stream up the Fallen Star's tail. Each one is solid card that pops out and shrinks away.
• Verdy B. Queen wears a garland of twelve petals round her chest in the three pinks of her tulip skirt, with a wave running round it that turns each petal over as it passes.

• A card you made at the Tinker's Workshop now always makes your highlight reel and run recap: its drawing going down line by line on the desk's paper, then a close camera on its squad marching to its first clash.

• The gift box that unlocks a warlord sheds its paper once 40% of it is torn away, about ten strips where it took more than twenty. Its loose ribbon lies on the table in satin loops.

• In a last blow, the dust kicked up where a figure lands draws behind the figures, not over their legs.
• On a phone, a finger dragged slowly through a neighbouring card on its way to the field no longer switches to it. Only a finger resting still on a card for a second takes it.
• A card played while the feedback form is sliding away is played, and F2 opens a fresh form.
• In the browser version, the bosses are crisp on their entrance pages and in their phase breaks, where they had stair-stepped edges.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 29 October 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

The last blows, cut from paper

The 0.7.40 post showed a last blow for each of the 27 governments, played by whoever wins the Throne of Vows. Many of their props were shapes drawn in code or old clip art. In 0.7.41 every prop is a piece of cut card standing on the board, with its own soft shadow and the felt's grain on it.

The Veiled Order's conjuror's cloth takes the shape of the warlord under it: the round of the head, the drape over the shoulders, each deep fold cut as its own card, a fringe dipping under every fold and a tassel at the crown. It comes down to the board round the feet.

The long drop, which ends the Undying God-Emperor's, the Court of Fortune's and the War Assembly's blows, used to fall past flat painted bands. It now falls through scenes laid in paper: the sky, the fields and villages, the earth, the bones and the fire, down to a cavern with stalagmites where the cauldron sits over its coals. The devil, the two imps and the pot are cut-card figures that move by their own parts, and the flames, embers and steam are paper too. The Covenant Republic's long climb goes up through the same paper to pearly gates cut from card, and the gold rays round a giant God-Emperor are layers of card.

The Philosopher King's cave is a rock outcrop built of slabs and arch stones round a real mouth, and the boulder that seals it rolls one whole turn and stops the right way up. The rest of the 27 got the same treatment:

• The Court of Fortune's wheel has a wooden rim, brass pegs and eight panels, and stops on the flame under a leather clapper. The trapdoor opens in the board's own corrugated card.
• The Shepherd Throne's sheep are black-faced, in shingled fleece, and the crook is ash with a horn hook.
• The Panoptic Bureaucracy's forms carry carbon copies and staples, and the filing cabinet slides in with its top drawer open.
• The Princedom of Masks has a gold and plum half-mask, a puppet control with linen strings, and tailor's shears that cut the string.
• The Lottery Republic's drum is a ten-rod cage, and the lot pops out of its hatch in the winner's colour.
• The Republic of Omens' crows fly both ways, each drawn for its own direction, and the Crusader Commons' trebuchet hangs its arm between two towers.
• The lands of the Uncarved Block have a teapot and tea bowl, a bindle, a fingerpost, a paper crane, a winding key, a candle and snuffer, a war horn and a hound.

Here is every one of the 27 at its moment, one column for each peace vow:

Off the Hinges

At his phase break the Houndmaster's near head lunges off his shoulders on its neck and bites the board. His Off the Hinges card used to show a giant head coming out of the sky. It now shows the bite as it happens: his own head on its stretched neck, collar still round it, driven nose down with its teeth in the board and the planks breaking up round it.

Champions: both seats on the same terms

The right-hand seat at the Champions table now plays by the same rules as the left.

• Its energy is added up from the pins it holds, the same way the left seat's is. It used to be read off a stored number, so a build code a friend sent you could play differently depending on which side you stood it on. It plays the same on either side now.
• It has a purse, starting empty. Its Cutpurses fill it, its Money Gunners are paid out of it instead of firing for free, and its Sellswords and Hoard Wyrms count it.
• The table plays in turns only, for every seat, so the left side can no longer hold energy back for the clash.
• Nobody at the table carries a potion belt, so a card or pin that brews a potion brews it for neither side.
• During the right side's turn, the console shows the right side: its draw, discard and exhaust piles and its energy. Your hand, your flasks and your run bar step aside until your turn comes back.
• One press of Fight starts one fight. A quick second press used to start a second.

Co-op: a code that stays, and friends

A player called lancer told us that their council code changed after they left the game to send it to a friend. The game had been closed while they were away, and when it started again it drew a new code, so the invite they had sent led nowhere. They also asked for a way to invite people they had played with before without leaving the game. This update does both, and our thanks go to lancer for the report and the idea.

Each copy of the game now keeps one council code of its own. Every council you gather opens under it, after a restart, after the game has been closed and after a day away, so an invite you sent earlier still brings your friend to your table.

Anyone at the table when a march begins is kept as a friend. The invite sheet lists your friends and what they are doing (gathering a council, on a march, or playing), each with an Invite button that rings them. The ring shows over whatever screen they are on, with Join and Not now. If a friend is gathering a council, that council comes first on the join note.

Puptential's family

The 0.7.40 post showed Puptential's nine final forms. The pup and its three middle forms have now been cut by hand in the same style, so the whole line reads as one family. All thirteen share the pup's scowling eye and cream scarf, and each middle form carries hints of the finals it can become: Pyret has sooty legs with ember cracks, a cinder crest and fox ears, Puddel a navy saddle and a shark's fin, Beagloom leaf ears, a flower bud and a thorny vine collar.

Ten languages, complete

German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese now each cover every string in the game, about 10,900 of them. Card, pin, potion and unit text that ran out of its box in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish and Russian has been shortened to fit.

The browser version

The first load no longer waits for the soundtrack. Only the title theme comes down with the game, and the rest of the music follows once the title is up, while the title theme plays. In our tests the title came up in 37.5 seconds where it took 46 on a 50 Mbit line, and in 71 seconds where it took 86 on a 25 Mbit line. On the 50 Mbit line the rest of the music was in about 9 seconds after the title.

Phones

• When you aim a spell, summon or potion with your finger, the count of how many it will hit is lifted clear of your fingertip, and a small old-TV screen in the opposite corner shows the field under your finger.
• A second tap now puts down a card you cannot play, such as a curse or a card you lack the energy for. It used to open the card again.
• A card slid up out of the hand plays when you lift it just past the line. It was being read as a tap and put back.

Also in this update

• The government's nameplate on the run recap and the crown's room dressed for your land, both shown in the 0.7.40 post, now appear in a real game. Before this they only appeared in our test screenshots.
• The War Council seat card's body-type switch is the same cut ticket switch as Champions' Play and Auto.
• The Chimera's On Strike heal now pays on the killing blow too.
• When a unit that stands still is thrown off its summoning spot, the spot is free again at once, so another summon can stand there.
• The High Roller achievement unlocks when you put up a stake at The Bone Casino, not when you walk past the table with your purse shut.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 28 October 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

A new warlord comes wrapped

Unlocking a warlord used to mean tracing an outline out of the dark. Now the new warlord arrives as a present. The page rolls over in that warlord's own wrapping paper and tears open onto a lamp-lit walnut table, where a box sits wrapped in that same paper (each warlord has a print of their own; the Pirate's is anchors and ships' wheels), tied with a satin bow, the warlord's painted sign hanging off it on a tag. While it waits for you, it fidgets on the table.

You open it yourself. Pull a tail of the bow and the knot draws out, and the ribbon falls loose. Tear the paper off a strip at a time: each strip peels back toward your hand, sheds a few flecks of torn fibre, and flutters down to the table. Lift the lid (the box comes up with it, then drops back out), carry it off and throw it aside. Part the tissue, and your new warlord is lying inside. Paper confetti goes up out of the box and settles on the tissue and on the figure, and then the warlord dances, shaking it off a pose at a time. Continue is a crimson ribbon, and on the way out the page rolls back over the present in the same paper.

Skip, or B on a controller, opens it by itself at speed, and every strip still tears.

The present is where you first see that every warlord now has a dance of their own: the King's royal wave, the Pirate's hornpipe, the Viking's war stamp and roar, the Ninja's shadow step, the Boxer's shuffle and uppercut, the Conductor's chug with two pulls of the whistle cord, the Cyborg's robot, the Dragon's wing beats, the Eternal's slow waltz, the Explorer's lookout, the Gunslinger's quick draw, the Mummy's shamble, the Spaceman's zero-gravity float and the Witch's cauldron stir. Choose Your Warlord shows a warlord's dance off first, the emote wheel's dance can roll it, and a warlord's achievement pop opens on it. The page after the present now has a single section for new warlords, with every warlord and every new look you have earned standing in their own world.

The throne fight opens on a versus screen

The Act IV throne fight, and every Champions fight, now opens on a versus screen in place of the mirror's arrival. Two halves of one sheet smash in from their own edges along a zig-zag cut, each printed in its side's land's ink with its government's crest, paper speed strips streaming along the seam. The V and the S lock together on the hit in a burst of card shards and gold foil. Each side's government nameplate is thrown in and each player's painted sign is slammed on, burning with cut-paper flames in that side's colour, and the halves grind against each other while the camera creeps in. Then they blow apart and every sign flies onto its own commander.

In a Champions fight with two a side, both players on a side stand together on their half.

When the field comes back, the packs' tapestries hang over it again, and each side now hangs its own: your packs on the left, in the order you drafted them from the middle out, the mirror's packs on the right. Both sides used to hang the mirror's. They go back up the moment the fight is decided, so the winner's last blow plays under an open sky.

A last blow for every government

The throne fight now ends the way the winner's three vows say it should. Each of the 27 governments has its own finishing move, played by whichever side wins, so a loss shows you the mirror's. If the Undying God-Emperor wins, the winner swells to the size of the sky in a blaze of gold, picks up the loser and throws them off the edge of the board, and the camera follows all the way down, through the clouds, past the fields and villages, through the earth and the bones and the fire, into a cauldron where two imps are waiting with forks and a devil leans in for a look. Then the camera climbs back up.

The Commonwealth wins with a hug. The winner walks over and holds the loser until there is nothing left to hold, and the loser comes apart into scraps of coloured paper that drift up and away.

The other 25 include tea while the loser takes root, a paper crane, a wind-up toy, a conjuror's cloth, a caber toss, a hound that carries the loser off, the Wheel of Fortune and a trapdoor, a puppet's strings, an eye in the sky, an iron statue, and a mob from the War Assembly who throw the loser off the board. Here is every one, at its moment:

A paper-doll lord (the Act IV mirror, or a Champions build) used to run over to the fallen warlord and stand staring at him until the fight gave up waiting. His strike now always lands.

The fourth act's ending

In the pop-up film that ends a won fourth act, the vows' banners now come over the act walls from behind on their strings. Each one waits behind its land's panel, swings up over the top, tips, falls down the front and slaps against it, printed on both sides so it reads as the vow while it comes over back first.

The fourth panel used to stand empty. Your government's nameplate now comes over it on a gold-rodded cloth as the caption reaches "And at the end of the road... yourself."

Pieces that rock where they stand in these films, crowds waving and hopping and bowing, now bump against card in their way instead of passing through it, so the Wild Kingdoms' warlord no longer stamps through the robber crag.

Your government's nameplate also stands opposite Uncle Jim on the coronation screen, thrown on the way the vow room throws it.

The recap after a march that swore all three vows carries the government's nameplate under your warlord's sign, on a win and on a loss. A march that took the fourth act stands in the crown's room dressed for its land, one room for each of the 27.

Uncle Jim dresses for your government

Once your three vows are sworn, Uncle Jim wears that land's costume: on his card's pop-out, on his figure on the field, and on every body he musters. The Act IV mirror's Jim wears the costume of the mirror's own build. Here are all 27:

About one send-off in a hundred (never in your first game), he turns up dressed as one of the 27 at random. And he has a pun or two for each act boss you fell, plus three more lines for a felled boss; the one about the trees hearing what you did is retired.

The Houndmaster bites

The Houndmaster's three heads are cut as working jaws now: a neck, a collar, a skull, a hinged lower jaw and a face, with the inside of the mouth drawn between them at any angle. At a phase break no head comes out of the sky any more. His own near head lunges off his shoulders on its neck, swelling to the size of the blow as it comes, hangs over the spot with its jaw dropped wide, drives down and bites the ground, shakes it twice, and is hauled back home along its neck.

In his entrance, each head rears back with its lips off its teeth and its own jaw dropping open on the gums and throat, whips down and forward, and the jaws slam shut, tug twice and let go. The paper teeth that used to snap in the air beside him are gone.

Champions

Champions is a new table on the title screen. Every run that beats Act III is kept on your shelf with its final build, and builds can be set against each other on the Throne of Vows, the Act IV fight: one against one, or up to four a side (two a side on phones and in the browser). Tap a build in the drawer and choose Left or Right to stand it on a base; a build can stand on both sides and fight itself. Play puts you in the lead left seat; Auto plays both sides while you watch. Any build can also be chosen as your next Act IV boss.

Choosing a build deals its slip into the drawer beside it, held down by the build's pins (hover one to read it), and a tap anywhere off the slip puts it away. Every control at the table is cut from card in its own way: arrow tags, tickets with punched notches, a luggage tag, a pennant, torn ends and folder tabs.

Friends' builds come two ways. Playing co-op hands your partner your shelf, and Send posts a build for an eight-letter code like KRTW-PLMB, which a friend types in under Add a friend's build. Each friend's builds file behind a tab of their own. Offline, Send falls back to the long code it used to give.

Both sides play alike. The right-hand seats are played by the same planner as Auto-play, turned round: the same card choices, targets and discards, onto summoning spots of their own down the far end of each road, where they used to muster every summon in a clump. In an Auto fight both hands are on show, the turn ribbons name whose turn it is, End Turn or Space pauses the whole fight, and a coin toss decides who opens each round. Each build's roads run across to the builds opposite, so two against two is one field with crossing roads instead of two separate boards. The figures at the table are bigger, with their signs hung over their heads as in a fight, and one that fell in the fight stands back up in its own colours.

Versus plays a friend live. At the War Council, with exactly one other player seated, the host presses Versus in the tent's top corner: the friend plays the mirror's seat from the right, with a tray of their own for their hand, energy and roads, or you both watch the host's two builds fight. A friend who wins sees their own government's last blow.

Crowns for Ascension 10

Win a run at Ascension 10 with a warlord, and that warlord's stand is closed into a cardboard crown: corrugated board cut into seven points, painted in your colour, the feet standing in the cup. The crown goes everywhere the warlord stands: Choose Your Warlord (where it rises out of the table the first time), the draft, every fight, the War Council's seats, the warlord's page in the Compendium and the Daily briefing. A march that fell in Act IV after taking Act III's throne counts. Crowning all fourteen is a new achievement, A Crown for Every Head.

Puptential's nine final forms

Puptential now evolves at 15 Exp instead of 20, and kills past the goal carry over onto the evolved form's bar. Its nine final forms used to be the pup's own body with one part swapped. Each is now a different creature, cut by hand, and five took new names to match:

• Fire: Emberax, a winged dragon, breathes fire over a crowd at range. Scorchtail, a monkey with a Pyromancy flame for a head, burns what stands near it. Magmara, a volcano-backed magma beast, burns whatever strikes it.
• Water: Tidewalker (was Tidehound), a being of water, holds the line and re-forms once. Brinejaw (was Brinecoat), a land shark, goes into a feeding frenzy. Broadshell (was Abyssel), a cannon turtle, fires a water shot that ricochets, charming everything it skips through.
• Green: Bramblemaw (was Bramblehound), a thorn-mawed vine monster, reaches a root down its lane. Bloomwing (was Bloomshepherd), a bird of petals, flies in anywhere and mends. Vinelurk, a grass mantis, hides in the grass until it pounces.

Sharing a run

The end-of-run highlights no longer pop up over things when the pointer passes by. The summary shows one big player with a Share button and a strip of moments to pick from; a click or tap opens the big view. The strip now leads with The whole march: the run's best moments trimmed and joined into one GIF with their labels on, ending on the store card. On Android, recording is now on by default (it pauses while the phone is hot or saving battery), and Share opens the phone's share sheet with the clip's preview.

Smaller things in the fight

Act bosses' verdicts. The verdict on a beaten act boss's page is now an object out of his own fight: FELLED is a crosscut saw, QUENCHED a steaming slack tub, COLLARED a buckled collar and lead, and so on for every act boss. The hit buckles the lord and knocks his sign, and the plate hangs under it.

Phase breaks stop the fight again. Since 0.7.32 the smaller phase breaks played over a running fight. That was confusing, so every break once more holds the fight for its whole show: the banner, the stage turn, the blow and the cards. A press still hurries it at four times speed. The Brass Colossus's two small breaks, Pressure Release and Foundry Override, now play as a short beat, with no banner to click away and no trip for the camera; The Foundry Stands Up keeps the full show.

Calvin's last floe bobs on the sea instead of see-sawing. It leans a few pixels on a spring with a short wave under it, its near side shows the slab's thickness in layers of ice with the sea lapping at its foot, and the Bear Beneath rides a little of its bob instead of being lifted into the air. Ripples come only when an end goes in, and the cards, aim marks and slams laid over the ice ride with it.

The Battle of Vows board no longer trembles when one side is a little behind; it only moves when the balance does. Its angels fly in from above the top of the screen on their own side and glide down over three seconds, wings beating, instead of popping into place, and one sent away lifts off and climbs out.

The Act IV mat comes down already split between the two lands. The cloth used to come down as one land and jump to two the moment it landed.

Confirming an upgrade carries the card from its seat to the bench, and the rest of the step falls off the screen around it.

The fight's console slides in from the screen edge nearest each piece, tier by tier up from the floor: the piles out of the bottom corners, then the energy gem from the left and the speed row from the right, then the turn plate and the log. It used to drop in from a whole screen below, so all anyone saw was a little bounce.

Pins. The pins the bar has no room for sit on a fanned stack of their backing cards with the count on top, instead of a gradient diamond.

Warlord signs each dye one part in your seat's colour, the way the King's cloth does: the Boxer's apron, the Conductor's livery, the Viking crew's shields, the Witch's brew, the Spaceman's stripe and flag, and so on.

Every Drop's Blood Droplets rise on the commander that bled and march out down one of its own roads.

AI hands hold Big Bang until the turn's summons have landed, so the Stokers split too. This is every hand the game plays for somebody: Auto-play, co-op AI seats and the Act IV mirror.

Potions. A potion's hover wears a manila tag tied on with twine. With a full belt, every flask's tag hangs on the page where there is room, and on a phone a tap picks a flask up and a second tap pours it.

Vows. The vow chart shows an act's two stops on one row, and the other one leaves the chart once you swear at one. The vows note now ends "Vows decide your ending."

Balance

• The Act IV mirror plays its hand with the same planner as Auto-play (and the Champions right seat): the same choices, order, summoning spots, targets and discards, read from its own side. Its speech, finisher and versus screen are as before.
• Act IV pays more pack XP than stopping at Act III. A march into the fourth act banks its Act III win (10 floors plus 5) on top of the shorter fourth road, where it used to be paid for the fourth road alone.
• The Brass Colossus: The Foundry Stands Up refills him to half his health, up from 35%.
• Mum, the Word has 50 health, up from 25.
• Puptential evolves at 15 Exp instead of 20, and its nine final forms were redesigned (above).

The browser version

The first load is split in two. The game's code downloads first and starts the engine, and the pictures and sounds come down while it compiles, under a page of Uncle Jim's how-to-play films, titled in your language, with a progress bar. In our tests over a 50 Mbit line, the title came up in 45 seconds where it took 53.

The felt mat keeps its plain roll in the browser. The cloth lay-outs from 0.7.37 froze Chrome for 16 to 20 seconds on the first fight while it built their shaders, so the 0.7.37 post's six ways of laying the mat are on the downloads and phones only. The government rooms behind a won fourth act's recap are left out of the browser too, which keeps the plain room.

Phones

• A finger's tap never plays a card now. It reads a card or puts it down, and a tap off the open card puts it down.
• Sliding along the hand only moves on to another card once your finger has rested on it for a second, so dragging a card up and across the fan no longer switches cards on the way.
• Tinker's Workshop is laid out for a thumb: every button is cut at a thumb's size in a slot made for it, and each dial is a stepper.
• Pass the Parcel's two ribbons and the potion toll's Cancel stay on their paper.
• Your commander's sign on the pack picker is cut at reading size and hung just over the crown, and the run recap shows your warlord's sign at full size.
• The Brass Colossus's new parts fly onto his joints in his refit, not far up and to the left of them.

Also in this update

• The End Turn plate no longer shakes and flies off the screen. It did on a slow machine, and during a hurried phase break.
• A tap on End Turn, or on any button drawn over the enemy lord, no longer makes him taunt you and swallows the press.
• In the released builds, the entrance page showed a bare cloth behind the lord instead of his painted world. It shows his world now.
• Haldric's shieldbearers come out of the castle for his great shield on every board, which fixes the known issue in the 0.7.37 post.
• The Back buttons on Choose Your Warlord, the War Council and the draft are cream arrow tabs, and the body-type toggle on Choose Your Warlord is a cut ticket switch, the same as the Champions table's.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 27 October 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

Every lord strikes in their own way

At a phase break, most lords used to drop a prop on your line. It fell out of the sky shrinking over a dark disc, squashed, held, and flew back up, the same for everyone. Now each lord's blow is its own move, made for the thing it is: 27 of them, for 25 lords. Calvin has three. The blow lands at the same moment as before, within the first second, so nothing about the fight's timing changed. Every piece is printed card, and nothing fades out: each one leaves by going somewhere, into the board, off the edge of the frame, or folded flat.

The Elder Treant's stomp card is now called Rising Root. A ridge runs through the board toward your line, the board tears, and a root the size of a wagon arches up and drives its tip down in front of your soldiers.

Blastcap lobs a lit keg end over end. It thuds down, rocks and skids while the fuse burns, swells, and bursts into its own staves.

The Houndmaster's hound comes down out of the sky with its jaws open while its lower jaw rises out of a gash in the board. They snap shut, shake once like a dog with a rat, and part.

The Brass Colossus brings down a forge press. It lets down on its rod, hisses while its gauge climbs, then stamps the board in with steam blasting out flat both ways.

The Mimic's slam is the chest it really is. It leaps in, hops down the board clapping its lid, and lands jaws first on your line, spitting coins.

Rex Mortifer's board tents up and rips, and a bone hand claws up through the hole, swats over at the wrist onto your soldiers, grips, and drags back under.

Calvin's three are the bear's paw, his Belly Flop spell (a penguin that leaps out of the sea, flops on its belly and toboggans at your line), and the berg: it shoulders up out of the floe, a crack runs up its face, and it goes over onto your soldiers as the sea comes up round it.

Perihelion's star finishes its fall: it streaks in on a trail of paper flame and punches a crater whose top layer peels back in flaps, then splits and sinks into it.

The board below has the other nineteen at the moment of the blow. Simple Ton's club is swung in one fast arc and buried in the board, Haldric's four tower shields slam down rim-first across the front, Wynken's bolster drifts down like a falling leaf and bursts in feathers, Silvertongue's gavel knocks twice before it comes down ("going, going, gone"), the Pale Rider's scythe swings down on a pendulum and slits the road, and the Grave Tide rolls in as a wave that breaks over your line and drains back.

These were filmed with each blow fired on its own, without the banner that comes before it in a fight, and with the screen shake off. Wally's is the exception: that tile is from his real first break at night.

Haldric's great shield

Haldric's Close Ranks break was redone so you can see it. At half health the camera comes in on his castle as the drawbridge drops, and four of his shieldbearers march out of the gate with the quarters of a gold shield held over their helmets. An armourer welds the quarters whole in front of him, the four throw it up to him, and he catches it, "+1 Armor" floating up off him, and throws his old blue shield back for the armourer to carry home before the bridge goes up. Then The Great Shield card plays, and his Armor goes from 1 to 2 for the rest of the fight.

On some boards the crew never comes out in this version; that is under Known issues at the end.

Entrances, with a show for each lord

The entrance page from 0.7.36 now plays in six beats. The house lights go down over the lord's own world, the lord comes on in silhouette in their own way, the lights hit on the landing and the lord's own slam is heard, the nameplate is slapped onto the page, the camera creeps in during the hold, and then the page peels away and the plate flies across the field and drops onto the lord's head. A boss holds for 2 seconds and an elite for 1.2, and a click once the name is down still cuts it short. Every beat has a quiet sound of its own.

When the followspot hits Wally, waving, the shadow he throws on the wall behind him is the wolf he turns into under the moon.

The Houndmaster runs on, and once he lands his three heads bite in turn, each on its own neck.

The six who rise through the floor each bring their own show. The stage floor splits under the Magma Magnate, three jets of lava go up, and he surges up between them.

Rex Mortifer's ledger drops open, its leaves riffle over with a soul going up off each, and he stands up out of the book's gutter like a pop-up page.

Blastcap's spark runs a fuse across the floor to a powder keg on his mark, and when the smoke clears he is standing where the keg was.

• The Mimic's page is mirrored, left for right, the way the Mimic is.
• The Fear Drinker flies on as a moth on a crooked flight, and a whisper comes out of the dark as his page comes on.
• The Iron Wardens' captain marches on in three measured steps.

Simple Ton stamps twice

At half health Simple Ton gets mad and stamps twice. The first stamp is a cross little hop that knocks the camera back off him. The second is the real one: it hurls your line back down the road and sends a ruck through the felt like a kicked rug. The near corner of the blanket flips up and flops back dog-eared, the border is dragged askew, and the card on the wall loses a strip of tape and hangs crooked. It stays that way for the rest of the fight.

The mat goes down like cloth

At the start of a fight the felt mat used to unroll the same way every time. Now it goes down one of six ways: unrolled off a tube, shaken out like a tablecloth, floated down on a cushion of air, unfolded from a folded square, rolled apart from two rolls, or dropped rumpled and smoothed flat. The way is picked from the fight's seed, so everyone at a co-op table sees the same one. A few fights keep the plain roll: torn pairs of mats, Wally's village, the floating board and the Battle of Vows. With Reduce Motion on, the mat drops in plain. On phones, and with Reduce effects on, the cloth is cut coarser so it costs less to draw.

The warlords' signs, and the King's cloth

The fourteen warlords' painted signs got a second and a third pass. Every name now keeps room above and below it, so none sits jammed against the top edge. The King's sign is now a cloth of estate: velvet dyed in his seat's colour, caught up under his crown and falling in two swags, with gold braid, an ermine hem and a gold tassel at each corner. The Queen's is the same under her tiara. The Eternal's sign is an obsidian clock face, the Boxer's is a side of his ring with his gloves hung off a corner post, the Pirate's board ends in gilt scrolls, the Dragon's plaque is beaten gold on a heap of card coins, and the Viking's shields hang close along his longship's rail. The loudest colours were toned down, and every sign is printed through the same paper grain as the cards. Your name goes on your warlord's sign over your commander in a fight and on the draft screen; here they all are with the sample name Marigold:

The King's cloth is a real cloth. Run the pointer across it and the velvet drags and tilts, the hem bends and the tassels swing. Half a second after you leave it, it starts easing back into its drape, whatever fold you left it in.

Three lords' names changed, and their plates with them. The bog lord is Vetch everywhere now, where his army used to be called the Bog Trappers, and the Warsmith and the Houndmaster dropped their "The". The Pale Rider's plate had a lot tag on it reading "1", which meant nothing; his horse's cast shoe hangs off the waystone's twine in its place, rimed with frost.

How a run ends

The verdict at the top of the end-of-run page is cut from card now. VICTORY is a prize ribbon: it lands with a rosette at each end, the ribbon's ends unfurl behind it, tails drop under the rosettes with a burst of paper confetti, and a fan of gold card rays turns slowly behind it.

DEFEAT is the same strip, ruined. It lands already split down the middle, and a beat later the tear gives and each half swings down off the one tack still holding it. Its right end is burnt away, and a scrap drops out of the tear.

Uncle Jim writes in ink

Uncle Jim's words used to be typed out a letter at a time. Now they are written: a wet drop of ink runs along the line with the newest letters, and behind it the ink draws back into crisp type. His walk-up on the road, his check-in note and the closing line of an event's result page are all written this way. A tap still finishes the line at once. On phones and in the browser each letter lands as a blot of wet ink and dries into its colour instead, and with Reduce Motion on the check-in note and an event's closing line are printed whole.

The Crayon Roads, redrawn

In The Crayon Roads you draw the next fight's roads yourself. Your warlord and the lord now stand on their own stands, exactly where the fight will put them and as big. The crayon wears down as you draw, since each road has only so much wax, and its stroke is the same line the fight draws down the middle of a road. When you cut them out, the knife goes round the roads three times, one sheet at a time, the waste card falls off the desk, and the cut sheets settle as the fight's roads with the toys dropping onto the mat where they stood. Coins on the sheet pay gold. In co-op every seat draws its own roads live.

Smaller things in the fight

Card faces. A card's flavour line now sits at the foot of its text box in a quieter ink, with room between it and the rules, so the rules read first. Spells and powers get 4 more pixels of text box, since they have no attack and health badges in the bottom corners, and 125 card faces print their rules a size bigger for it. This is everywhere a card face is drawn: the hand, rewards, the shop, the draft and the vows.

Hurrying a phase break. A click, a tap or the controller's A during a big phase break's reveal now runs the rest of it at four times speed. The fight is held while a break plays, so nothing is skipped and you are back in the fight sooner. The press that dismisses the break's banner doesn't count, and in co-op the break always plays at its own pace.

Phase tabs. The little paper tabs that mark a boss's phase breaks on the health strip now fold with the strip as it pleats down, and stay at their place along it.

Change clocks. The countdown rings for an egg about to hatch, a unit turned into something else by Polymorph, and one of Wally's villagers about to turn at moonrise are now one ring, cut to fit the stand it lies round. The moon and Polymorph rings used to be nearly three stands wide.

Barricade+. The upgraded Barricade raises a wall of 3 barricades across one lane, the way Grix's walls go up. You still aim it anywhere for free; the aim picks the lane and how far up it the wall stands, and while you drag, a pale outline stands on every spot a barricade will land.

Uncle Jim's Care Package. The Mummy, the Eternal and the Witch have a spell as their signature card, so the Care Package used to give them a plain unit instead. Now it plays a free copy of their signature spell (Pharaoh's Curse, Rift in Time or Witches' Brew) on the first turn of each fight, then exhausts it. The spell is held up so you can read it, and the package's chest pops on the card as it goes out.

When a lord musters troops onto the field, the stamp that marks where they land now breathes in a ring cut from the lord's paper, so it is easier to spot.

Co-op

When an ally recommends an option, the ring in their colour is now traced round the option's own shape (a card's gems and badges, a slip's tab) instead of a rough box, and it stands clear of the controller's own highlight.

Balance

• Pack Tactics now counts allies within 400 instead of 900. At 900 it reached across most of the arena, so the whole army always counted as one pack and the range ring said nothing. Now the pack is the bodies on its own road and the next one over. Spirit Rites keep their 900.
• Chimera (Mutagenesis): On Strike, heal 1 (2 when upgraded), in place of On Kill, +2 max HP.
• Barricade+ raises a wall of 3 across one lane (above). Plain Barricade still drops one anywhere for free.
• Uncle Jim's Care Package casts the signature spell for the Mummy, the Eternal and the Witch instead of summoning a plain unit (above).
• Haldric's Close Ranks now hands him the great shield: his Armor goes from 1 to 2 for the rest of the fight.

The browser version

The browser's fights were sluggish, even raising and playing a card. Measured in Chrome, most of each frame of a player's turn was spent waiting on Chrome's own graphics process, and one setting was most of that wait: the live cut-out edge on every punched-out piece on the field (the props, the curios, the commanders' cut edges). It is now off by default in the browser, and "Cut-out edges on stand-up pieces" in the Advanced settings still turns it back on. The lanes' drop shadow and the lane threat marks were made cheaper too.

On a 1280x720 page, the median frame of a player's turn went from 16.7 ms to 8.8, holding a raised card from 17.2 to 8.3, and playing it from 19.6 to 8.4. On a fullscreen 2560x1440 page the turn went from 19.3 ms to 9.6. With Chrome slowing the CPU to a quarter of its speed, the share of a turn's frames over 33 ms went from nearly all of them to between 5% and 36%.

After that, what was left was draw calls, and most of them were things holding still:

• While your hand rests, the browser draws it once and lays it down as a single picture; it goes back to being drawn the moment anything in it moves. A card being carried is drawn live and the rest of the fan stays a picture. With the hand at rest, a fight's frame went from about 870 draw calls to about 530.
• The fight's buttons and widgets (the speed buttons, the End Turn plate, the piles, the energy seal) are printed the same way once they hold still, in the browser and on phones.
• A unit's stand and its health strip are now drawn in one call each, with the same picture, so a unit costs about 3.5 draw calls in the browser where it cost about 6.3.

Phones

Android starts on far less memory. Android now builds on our own version of the game's engine. As the game starts, the engine keeps a parsed copy of the game's scripts, and almost all of it was the insides of functions that nothing reads again. Ours lets those go. On a Pixel 10 Pro XL the game's peak memory while starting went from about 2,525 MB to about 860, it settles at the title holding about two thirds of what it did, and the game is ready for its first fight about 4.5 seconds sooner. A game holding less memory is less likely to be the one Android closes.

The muster stopped hitching. Switching between the two body types on Choose Your Warlord stalled a phone for seven or eight frames of a quarter of a second each, because each warlord's pictures were read as he turned. A phone now reads both body types ahead while the muster is open, and the switch runs without a frame over 34 ms. The first spin of the wheel no longer hitches as each warlord's sign is cut.

Reading your hand. Press a card in your hand and slide your finger along the fan: each card you pass over rises to be read, and nothing is played. Lift your finger and that card stays open. Slide up out of the hand and the card under your finger is played.

Choose Your Warlord. The front warlord's sign is cut at reading size on a phone, and the twelve colour chips stand in one row; the "Player color:" label gave up its room to fit them. Tapping a starter card lifts it over everything to read.

Also in this update

• Heartwood Unbound no longer jumps the camera back to the middle of the field when its pull-out stops, and the board's settle starts from rest.
• Calvin's open mouth is redrawn: a lip on the jaw's edge and teeth that read as teeth.
• Were-Wally's swiping paw is a wolf's paw in his own fur.
• The Twins' swords stay inside the camera's view in the top lane.
• Haldric's gate no longer shows two sets of drawbridge chains.
• A press while the opening film is still loading shows "Loading..." in the skip corner, then "Tap again to skip" once the game is in.
• Grand Experiment's text says "your units gain +5 max HP" instead of "your fielded units".

Known issues

• On some board layouts in the Iron Wardens fight, nobody comes out of the castle for Haldric's great shield: it changes on his arm between two frames, with the camera left at the whole desk. It is fixed for the next update.
• When the Care Package plays its spell at the start of a fight, the line naming it can run off the left edge of the screen, and the Your Turn banner unfolds behind the card.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 26 October 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

The browser version

The title signposts. Hovering a signpost on the title screen lifts it on a spring. That spring was worked out once a frame, so any frame of 50 ms or more (a hitch, or a machine running under 20 fps) made it run away: the board grew without limit, flickered at its edges and went off the screen. A playtester was left looking at a giant Quit board. The springs now step in small slices of time and are held to their range, so a slow frame can no longer throw them.

Loading. The page used to freeze while the game loaded: 11.5 seconds with nothing drawn and no input taken on a fast PC, and 81 seconds with Chrome slowing the CPU to a quarter of its speed. It now loads the way the desktop version does, behind the studio card, which keeps drawing the whole time. The longest stall left is about 3 seconds (6.6 with the CPU slowed), and the title answers the pointer 15 to 19 seconds after the page opens.

Frame rate. In the browser every draw call is paid for twice, once by the page and once by Chrome's graphics process, so the work went into drawing fewer things. The dots along the map's trails were one draw each and are now drawn together: a run's first map went from 2,368 draw calls to 464. The mug, plant, tape and the rest of the desk around the mat are no longer drawn when they are out of shot, which takes a first fight from 1,518 draw calls to 1,268 on every platform, with the same picture.

The whole campaign. A recorded run was then played through the browser version in Chrome, from the title to the end: all three acts, 16 fights and 83 screens in 30 minutes. Its memory stopped rising at the end of act 1 at about half of what the browser allows, and stayed there through acts 2 and 3.

Phones

The long zoom is back. In 0.7.30 the long zoom out past the desk was made desktop-only, after a phone crashed a few seconds after zooming out of the first fight. The cause has now been found. A looped sound tells the engine where its loop ends, and the room's clock tick, the weather and the other long backing sounds all set that end one frame past their last real frame. A desktop reads whatever happens to be there and carries on. A phone keeps guarded memory after a big block, the clock tick's loop ended right on it, and the game crashed. Every looped sound now ends on its last frame, and the long zoom works on phones again. On every platform, the wind over the fields in the long zoom now plays all 9.5 seconds of its loop instead of repeating the first 1.9.

Memory. A phone's memory use climbed screen by screen through a run, and a game holding a lot of memory is the first one Android closes. The biggest parts of that climb are gone:

• Text caches. The engine keeps a cache of letter pictures for every font at every size it has drawn, and never empties one. By the end of a run these held 151 MB of memory and 123 MB of video memory on a phone. The ones the game no longer draws from are now cleared when the screen changes, and on a phone and in the browser all of them are cleared as you go into a fight and at the end of each act.
• The title screen's marchers. Each marching figure kept its picture for the rest of the session, so after sixteen minutes on the title the game held 412 of them, about 310 MB of video memory, and carried them through the whole run. Now it keeps the pictures on the road and a small store of the rest.
• The long zoom's room was built behind every fight from its first frame, about 25 MB of memory and 20 MB of video memory each time, and about 1,070 extra draw calls on a phone. On a phone it is now built the first time you zoom out that far.
• The highlight clips for the end-of-run reel kept every frame in memory after saving it to disk, 17 MB by act 2. They let go once each clip is saved.
• On 0.7.35, the guard that frees pictures when a phone runs short of memory mistook the game's own start-up for a climb, and cut every picture budget to a quarter for the rest of the session on some phones. It now waits until the game has finished starting.

Battery. On one phone the game drained the battery and ran it hot even while plugged into a computer. It drew a whole frame sixty times a second on every screen, and nearly every screen has something moving all the time: the marchers on the title, the dolls on the map, the soldiers bobbing in a fight. On phones the game now draws sixty frames a second while anything is happening (a finger on the screen, a card in flight, a fight playing out) and thirty while only those idle loops move. With battery saver on, or the phone running hot, it draws thirty throughout, fights included.

Macs

On a Mac the first launch could crash while the window was sized to fit the screen. Reduce Motion skips the animation that set it off, which is how some players got past it. The window is now sized outright, with no animation.

The Steam overlay never loaded on any Mac build until now, because of a mistake in how the game was signed. It loads now, so Shift+Tab and the War Council's Invite work on a Mac.

Invite also no longer depends on the overlay anywhere. If the overlay doesn't open, the War Council lays out its own list of your Steam friends who are online, the ones already playing first, and each Invite goes straight to their Steam chat.

Painted nameplates

Every enemy lord's nameplate is now painted on an object out of his own world. Gorehoof's is the fence rail he charged through, with his name burnt in. Rex Mortifer's is a page torn from his ledger with his name as the heading, Verdy B. Queen's is the gift tag she was tied up with, and Calvin's is a block of sea ice with his penguins standing on it. There are 46 plates, each painted separately in English and all ten translations, so in German Gorehoof's rail is branded Bluthuf. They land and stay still.

The 14 warlords' signs take any name. Each is drawn in several widths, and the game picks the narrowest one that holds your name and prints it in that warlord's own lettering. The Gunslinger's is a reward bill nailed to saloon planks. Here he is under the sample name Marigold, facing Gorehoof, with the two ends of the same moment cropped side by side:

A new entrance for elite and boss fights

Elite and boss fights now open on the lord's entrance page. A screen-sized sheet rolls on from his side of the board, printed with his own lair, and he comes out into the middle of it the way he arrives at his phase breaks. He lands with a slam, the camera creeps in while he holds, and the page peels back off onto the field. A boss holds for 2.3 seconds and an elite for 1.4, and a click cuts the hold short. This replaces the big sign that used to be ripped off the screen; ordinary fights still open under that.

The act bosses' plates

Each act boss's nameplate stands in a little paper scene of his own: the Elder Treant's roots and leaves, Verdy's blooms and bees, Wally's daisies by day and moths at moonrise, the Magnate's volcano, Rex's ledger riffling, the Colossus venting steam, the Avatar's squall and frost, and Calvin's floe landing in the sea. On the screen after you beat him it bursts out in full and keeps going. Over his head during the fight it plays quietly, with fewer and smaller pieces. Reduce Motion turns it off. Here is the Magnate's, on a plain backdrop:

Pop-ups are sheets of card

Every pop-up that used to fade in and vanish is now a stiff sheet of card, and each one comes on and goes off its own way. The first-launch notice hangs on a pin. The spoils' ask is tossed onto the mat, and March On sweeps it off toward the road. The settings Yes and Cancel are dealt face down and turned up, the New Game ask stands up off the page, the quit plate drops from a height, feedback slides across the desk, the language flap drops down and the run's last ask rises like a postcard. A sheet lifted off the desk throws its shadow under it, and its buttons' words stay balled up until it has landed facing you, then unfold.

The upgrade confirm lifts the card out of the grid and slides its upgraded self out from under it, turning over once. The event's potion toll stands each flask up off the stone, and an answer knocks them over. A pop-up on its way out no longer holds the screen, so what is under it answers clicks while the paper goes. Reduce Motion keeps the old quick pop-in.

Relics are pins

Relics are now called pins, in English and in all ten translations, everywhere a player reads the word. Only the name changed, and every pin does what its relic did. Three names changed with it. The Sealed Reliquary event is now Pinned to the Grave, the Reliquary Auction is Going, Going, Pinned, and the Ashen Reliquary pin is the Cinder Cottage. Two Steam achievements, Trinket Fancier and The Vault, say pins too.

In the treasure vault the pin cards stand up off the floor instead of fading in see-through over the gold. The pin you take leaves a hole in its card and flies to the bar, and the room waits until it is pushed home before going back to the map.

Every pin you take is pinned into the bar now. The newest always gets the bar's last slot, and the older ones step back into the "+N" count. Before, a pin with no slot left landed on the count as a sparkle and was never pinned in. On a phone the run bar is a single row of tiles.

Swearing a vow

Vows now wait for your first win. Until you have won a march once, no vow stops on the map and the run bar shows no vow mark, so a first march is the three acts on their own. In co-op the party goes by the host's profile. On the first map of your first march with vows, Uncle Jim puts up a new note, "3 vows to Act 4", with a drawn loop: the pawn hops the three act cards, each card's corner flies into the vow triangle over a face-down fourth card, and card IV turns over.

Each vow's gain and cost now lie beside its card from the moment it is dealt, gain on clean paper and cost on scorched paper, so there is nothing to click to read them. A co-op playtester asked why they had to. On a phone there is no room for the notes, and one tap still reads a vow.

While you hold Hold to Swear, the vow's own picture tears through the room. When the hold fills, the picture pours back into the card, and the card is crushed into the shape of its corner and hammered into the triangle. It arrives white-hot and cools to its own colour.

The third vow makes the triangle. Its corners part, hang and slam together, light bursts out, and the land your three vows make is named. Each of the 27 lands has its own crest, thrown out of the triangle, its own little paper scene, and its name unrolling on a ribbon in its colour.

Act IV

Act IV's last boss is now your previous build, not the one that just beat act 3. Before, a march with no friend's build waiting fought itself. Now it is a friend's unbeaten build if there is one, then your previous build, and only on your first march past act 3 the build that just won. In co-op no two mirrors are the same player's build.

A playtester's Act 4 boss died on its first turn. With no army on the board, a Kicked Anthill on each side traded wounds back and forth in a single frame until one commander fell. A pin answering a wound no longer sets off another wound pin. The AI that played that boss also kept playing a card that cost it health, so the card-playing AI shared by the mirror, Auto-play and co-op's AI seats now weighs what a play buys: it won't draw with nothing left to draw, or pay health in the last quarter of its own.

The mirror stands as tall as your warlord now (its doll was drawn a third shorter), a Power it plays shows its own picture instead of a stand-in flame, and its Commander's Heart breaks the way yours does, with the same banner, on every seat in co-op.

At the door of Act IV, Uncle Jim now dresses as the government your three vows make. There are 27 new portraits, one for each, and he keeps his on the Act IV map and in the coronation dance. Here are twelve:

His walk-up on the road there has a third line, his word on what you stand for, one for each of the 27. For the God-Emperor: "So it's The Undying God-Emperor, with every city kneeling and you ruling forever. Forever is a long time, sprout, so I packed snacks."

The carpet under the last fight is now two lands. Each of the 27 lands has a carpet of its own, with its crest's emblem in the side panels, its band in its own colour, and its three vows' colours as the stripes. Your land's carpet lies on your side and the mirror's on its side, blending into each other across the middle. A side whose vows make no land keeps the Throne's own midnight carpet, and so does the browser version, which leaves the 27 carpets out to keep its download small. Here the left side's vows make The Free Villages and the right side's The Conqueror's Wheel:

The toys round that field are the two sides' vows now, one for each vow, each in its own side's half and in its vow's own colour: the Assembly's ballot box, the Uncarved Block's stump and sprout, the Leviathan rising from its sea, Sun Tzu's bamboo book and command flag, the khan's torch, the Inner Citadel's tower, Fortune's wheel and its little king, and the throne under heaven's cloud. Just War keeps its broken sword. Click a toy and it plays. Fortune's wheel spins, and a hard enough spin throws the king off:

Finishers

Rex Mortifer has a new finishing move, The Ledger Closes. The warlord ducks the hand that caught him at the false death, cuts the ledger off its chain and holds it open at him. Nine leaves turn, a soul tears out of each, and the souls drag him spinning into his own book, which is slammed shut. It replaces the soul jar crushed in a fist.

The Grave Tide's finisher pulls the plug. A paper whirlpool opens under him, he turns like a cut-out on a turntable as he goes down, a folded newspaper boat circles after him, and then the tide drains back down the wall.

When a boss's break changes the stage, the camera now glides back to take the whole change in and comes home afterwards, and the fight carries on while it does. Reduce Motion, or a camera you are dragging, keeps your view. Here is Simple Ton's turn, set off on its own without the banner before it:

In battle

When an enemy spell is coming for your commander and he is off screen, a thin red arc on the edge of the screen points at him. It breathes faster as the spell gets close and flares if he is hit.

The gold guard ground a guard volley lays round your commander now stirs with its card. It swells out from him once it is laid, and again whenever you point at, tap or read the volley's card.

Every enemy card read now tucks your hand away, and nothing else stands up beside it: no unit card, no spell telegraph and no tip. One of Uncle Jim's notes already up steps out of sight until the last card is filed.

While a summon's arrow is green and locked on a spot it can land on, a faint glint runs down it from the card to the tip.

The Chaos Cocktail now holds its verdict up as a flask over the whole screen, with its name, a line on what it does and a Throw button, and the calamity waits for you to throw it. Every battle wheel spins faster now, and a click, tap or button press hurries it onto its wedge.

The Cyborg's Copy Chip can take a villager off Wally, and that villager now carries the moon with it. After 10 seconds on the field it turns into its werewolf, and 10 seconds later back again, with its wounds carried across. A ring on the ground round each one shows its clock. In this clip the clock is wound forward:

Coins tossed off a body under Colossal Stomp's foot wait for the foot to lift, so you can see them spin.

Between fights

Leaving the draft, each pack's crest now flies at the screen and marks it its own way, and the warlord breaks through the paper along the marks. All 21 packs have their own mark and their own sound. Behind You! stabs through from behind and wrenches the cut open, Primordial Growth splits the paper along its roots, and Pandemonium wrings a whirlpool hole.

Click the sign on the title screen enough times and a chain snaps. It hangs and spins on the other one. A few more hits drop it, and a new sign swings down.

On the draft screen your sign hangs over your warlord's head, as it does in battle. Under his feet, the Back plate covered it on a phone.

Your own achievement pops no longer carry the red "Achievement earned" caption, and a new warlord's painted sign is bigger on the pop.

When a new warlord is revealed, the starting deck shows each card once, with "3 x" or "2 x" in cut paper before any you hold more than one of. On a phone the signature pin fills the left side of the stage.

The Feather Bedroll now heals you fully when you rest in a craft room (it used to add 25% of your maximum health). Under the Eclipse Lens, which only lets you heal between acts, the Rest bed stands greyed out with nothing under it, when resting has nothing else to give you.

On the spoils, March On no longer asks if you want to leave rewards behind when you opened a pick and skipped it. It still asks about anything you never looked at.

Co-op

When an ally recommends an option, their warlord's face now pokes up on the card's top edge, grinning, and the card is ringed in their colour. Press the option you recommended again to take the recommendation back.

• Your own plaque in the wait window has a Pins button.
• A player is never seated as "Open seat"; the host seats them under their Steam name.
• An ally in a craft room is shown as "In the craft room".

On a phone

The muster shows all twelve player colours, in two rows of six, each a fingertip wide. It used to show one chip, yours, which read as the only colour there was. In Settings the colour chips are bigger too, and every word on the Settings sheet is 1.6 times the size.

The upgrade confirm shows the card before and after at the full height of the screen, with the question and Confirm beside them.

A minigame's small board is brought up to fill the screen, up to 1.8 times its old size.

• Tap an open card in your hand again to set it down. On a pick from your hand, the card you are reading moves aside so it never covers Confirm.
• Pin picks fill the stage, and Uncle Jim's check-in and send-off sheets are cut to fit a phone.
• Many buttons, chips and tabs got bigger to tap: the title's corner buttons, the Compendium's tabs and rows, the map's ink tools, the battle's feedback quill, and every short button.
• A long event page scrolls instead of shrinking its words.

The Siege Works robot

The Siege Works pieces are a little wind-up tin robot now, with glass eyes in brass rims, cog ears that turn, a steam whistle on his lid, gears behind a round chest window and a key in his back. He has a new song too, "Come and Get It".

Also in this update

• Every enemy card's flavour line, the vow cards' oaths and Wally's last stand are now translated in all ten languages.
• Keyword tooltips say what the keyword does and stop. The fine print came off about 50 of them.
• An upgraded Instar is stronger from its first molt.
• The boar lord is just Gorehoof now.
• Feedback typed in another language reaches the developer with an English translation beside it, so write in whichever language you like.
• The first-launch notice about gameplay stats now says that if you send feedback, you may get a digital thank-you note.
• The Travelling Medic stands on the event's first page again, and has his left arm back in Bottled Three Times Over.
• The gambler in Double or Nothing is called "he", as he is drawn.
• A potion pulled off the belt is let go even when the bar rebuilds under your finger.
• A held map pencil no longer swallows clicks meant for a form over the map.
• On Uncle Jim's send-off, pointing at a pin that names a unit shows that unit's card, as on his check-in.
• On a controller, the highlight no longer rides a picked pack into the crest strip.

Known issues

• On a phone, in the chest-pick minigame, the two chests you did not pick fade out see-through.
• A lucky Flurry's "Nine Lives!" can peek out from behind Colossal Stomp's foot for half a second.
• An enemy volley's card can sit on the screen edge right over the new red arc.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 25 October 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

Twenty-seven endings

Every land has its own paper, its own back wall and its own pieces that stand up, slide and turn. Here are sixteen of them, with the three vows behind each one.

The Assembly's lands are ruled by their people.

The Commonwealth (The Assembly, Just War, The Inner Citadel): "You gave the crown back, and the people rule themselves. Every town sends a speaker to the assembly, and the army only guards the borders." Then: "The land has had forty years of peace. Its people are not rich, but nobody goes hungry, and every child learns to read."

The Lottery Republic (The Assembly, Just War, Virtue and Fortune): "Nobody runs for office here. Each spring the magistrates are drawn by lot from every name in the land, a farmer one year and a baker the next."

The Merchant Republic (The Assembly, The Art of War, Virtue and Fortune) wins its wars with loans instead of soldiers. Then: "The ports grew rich, and the harbour filled with ships from everywhere."

The Republic of Omens (The Assembly, The Art of War, Divine Right): "The people vote, and then the augurs read the sky to see if heaven agrees. Enemy armies learned to fear the omens, because the augurs always found a bad one for them."

The War Assembly (The Assembly, Submit or Fall, Virtue and Fortune): "The assembly votes for war the way a market haggles, loud and fast, and whoever promises the richest plunder wins."

Under the Uncarved Block there is barely a state at all.

The Free Villages (The Uncarved Block, Just War, The Inner Citadel): you live among the villages as a neighbour. Then: "Nobody remembers your name now, which is what you wanted."

The League of Free Towns (The Uncarved Block, Just War, Virtue and Fortune): "The towns govern themselves and trade with anyone who comes in peace. You keep the roads open and the tolls low, and otherwise leave them be."

The Clanholds (The Uncarved Block, Submit or Fall, The Inner Citadel): each valley belongs to the clan strong enough to hold it. Then: "The clans fought each other every generation, and the strongest always won. The land stayed hard and poor, but no outsider ever conquered it."

The Wild Kingdoms (The Uncarved Block, Submit or Fall, Virtue and Fortune): "There is no law but strength. Any band that can take a town may keep it, as long as it flies your banner and sends you a share."

Swear the Leviathan and you rule alone.

The Shepherd Throne (The Leviathan, Just War, Divine Right): "You rule as heaven's shepherd. The law is gentle, the hungry are fed from your granaries, and the one crime that is never forgiven is to doubt you."

The Court of Fortune (The Leviathan, Just War, Virtue and Fortune): "Your word is law, and you leave much of it to chance. Offices are won at dice, and a condemned prisoner may call heads or tails for a pardon."

The Panoptic Bureaucracy (The Leviathan, The Art of War, The Inner Citadel): every subject has a file, and every file is read. Then: "There has been no crime and no rebellion for a hundred years. The forms have grown so many that a farmer needs three permits and a week to sell a cow."

The All-Seeing Throne (The Leviathan, The Art of War, Divine Right): "Your seers say heaven shows them every plot before it hatches, and your spies make sure heaven is never wrong."

The Iron Imperium (The Leviathan, Submit or Fall, The Inner Citadel): "You command every road and every legion, and the empire runs like a well-kept clock. Cities that open their gates get roads, laws and a garrison; cities that refuse are burned."

The Undying God-Emperor (The Leviathan, Submit or Fall, Divine Right): "You became the Undying God-Emperor. Every city that would not kneel was burned, and the rest built you temples."

Then: "Heaven never let you die. The realm has knelt to you every dawn for three hundred years, and nobody alive remembers a time before you."

In co-op the rest of the party is in the book with you. Depending on the land they share the rule at your side or kneel with the realm, and under the God-Emperor they kneel at the foot of the steps as gold statues.

A long line now goes up one sentence at a time, so a caption is never more than two lines deep.

Founding all 27 earns a new achievement, Every Land. The Records page keeps the lands you have founded as a collection, each with its own medallion and the three vows behind it.

A new question in the opening film

The crown page at the start of the game now asks the question the fourth act answers: "Will you give power to the people? Bring peace to the land? Or rule it as a god-emperor?" Each answer stands up on its own words. On "the people", a warlord comes up with his fist raised among cheering townsfolk.

On "peace", another rises with strip fields, a village and a windmill whose sails turn. On "god-emperor", a king comes up at the foot of the steps, gold temple pylons stand up beside him, and both crowds turn round and bow to him.

The cardboard crown still rises on "Seize the Cardboard Crown".

Swearing a vow

Choosing a vow card no longer swears it. The other cards step away and the one you picked stands beside what its relic gives you, on clean paper, and what it costs you, on scorched paper.

To swear it, hold the Hold to Swear ribbon for a second and a half. Let go early and it sinks back. Once it is sworn, the lantern lights, the card flies into its corner of the triangle and the room clears away to whatever comes next.

The scorched note at the war stop now makes clear that choosing any Vow of War gives the next enemy commander 30% more health.

On a controller, the highlight traces the true outline of whatever it is on: each card with its icon and ribbon, a sworn corner of the triangle, the ribbons with their swallowtails.

On a phone the three cards are dealt in one row at reading size, with the triangle and the war note in a column beside them.

The Elder Treant wakes in place

The Elder Treant's last stand, Heartwood Unbound, used to swap in a second tree. Now the old one turns where he stands. A gold front runs up from his heart, his bark becomes the Heartwood's as it passes, his crown goes orange and throws off its green leaves, and a pair of antlers grows out of the top.

The same turn up close at half speed:

A faster start

On desktop the studio card and the opening film now play while the game is still loading, so the first picture is up in under a second instead of about nine. Phones load the same way now and need less memory to start, which is why the Android download had been held back at 0.7.32 and is now up to date.

Smaller changes you can see

Prospector's Pan now pays out as the fight opens. The top bar stays down a moment, the Pan lights up in its slot and the coins arc into your purse. Shown at half speed.

Once every spoil is taken, March On swells and keeps breathing, so you can see where to go next.

Boss phase breaks on the health bar are paper tabs. The next one flutters as the bar closes on it, and a break tears its flap off.

Ending your turn always tucks your hand away so you can watch the fight, and it stays tucked through the enemy's turn and a phase break's banner. Shown at double speed.

The draw, discard and exhaust pile views show each card's live "Now:" line, the same as in your hand.

On phones, unlock traces follow your fingertip. Circle the card and the pen chases your finger round the outline. Every trace also has a Skip ribbon, or B on a controller.

In The Crayon Roads, a toy in the way no longer stops the crayon. It runs round the toy's edge and carries on, and no coin is dealt where no road can reach it.

Calvin's ring of foam no longer lies across the warlord who sinks him.

Uncle Jim's door is taller and narrower, so the wide lens no longer squashes it, and his words no longer hang below the plate when you tap through them.

Also in this update

• The Twins sing a new song, "Hew and Haft", a brother and sister tango. Trapper's Delight has a new song too, "Set Me Off".
• An open pack in the Compendium plays its theme song.
• The Echo Vial's copy of an X card keeps the X it was cast with.
• The top bar fits three-digit gold without running off its tile.

Known issues

• Open a pile view in the first second or so of a turn and the arena's intro tip can sit across it.
• The red fill of the health bar in the top bar pokes a little above its outline.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 24 October 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

Three vows

Each of the first three acts now has one marked stop on its map: a craft room, a battle or a "?". Which act gets which is dealt at random when the run starts. At the stop you can swear a vow, picked from three vow cards in a dark garden that lights a lantern in each vow's colour.

Pick a card and it folds into the big triangle, filling its corner with the vow's colour. The same triangle sits in the run header for the rest of the march, and hovering it shows the vows you have sworn.

The fate stop is a new event, The Spinners at the Crossroads: three old women at a milestone, one measuring a thread, one twisting it, one holding the shears. Walk on and the page is cut along the thread into a different event.

Every vow hands you a relic named after it, with a bonus and a cost. They make the run harder overall:

• The Assembly: draw 2 extra cards each round, -1 max energy.
• The Uncarved Block: unspent energy carries into the next round, draw 1 fewer card.
• The Leviathan: your commander takes half damage, and you can no longer Rest.
• Just War: your units gain Shield 3, battles pay no gold.
• The Art of War: stun up to 4 enemies for 4 seconds as each battle starts, and the enemy copies your first 2 summons.
• Submit or Fall: 3 damage to up to 8 enemies each round, survivors gain +1 attack.
• The Inner Citadel: heal your commander 4 each round, no potions.
• Virtue and Fortune: your first turn plays your top 2 cards for free, and you take two Curses.
• Divine Right: +1 max energy, lose half your max HP.

Swearing at a war stop also makes that battle's commander tougher.

The Road to the Throne

With all three vows sworn, the act 3 boss turns the act instead of ending the run. Uncle Jim checks in one last time with a relic from a new pool, and a short straight road runs up to the throne. The mirror's army camps along it, one camp for every pack it carries, and at the top the road splits down the middle and swings open like a pair of doors.

The last boss is the build that beat act 3: your own warlord, packs, deck, relics and Powers, played as a seat across the board. Its relics and Powers hang along the top right so you can see what it has.

Heaven or the Pit

The final fight has no phase breaks. Instead the arena swings with the two sides' health. When you are winning, the board rises into a sky with angels at its edges. When you are losing, the desk cracks and the board drops into a red pit with giants standing round the rim. It has its own song, Heaven or the Pit.

In co-op the whole party makes each vow choice together, and the throne seats one mirror for every player.

How it ends

Win, and the pop-up book tells it. As each act's boss goes over, that act's vow banner is flung up over the back wall of its land and swings down to hang in the middle. Then one voiced scene shows the government your three vows made. There are 27 of them, and winning the fourth act at all earns the Know Thyself achievement.

Lose on the throne and you get a defeat film of your own.

Also in this update

• A spell that marks a spot goes off as soon as it has been shown, at the top of your turn, with no countdown.
• Zoomed out past the fight, a click no longer picks up a card you cannot see.
• Smaller phase breaks play their stomp and cards over the running fight instead of pausing it.
• A lord's opening turn is no longer one energy short.
• Acorn Cache gives +5 commander max HP after every battle, instead of +30 when you pick it up.
• Failed Experiment summons 2 bodies instead of 1.
• Magma Brute's death crack hits for 5 instead of 1 and reaches much further.
• Flamechain leaps further, and chain spells show their reach as a ring on the ground.
• The male Cyborg wears every pack as himself.
• The Clanholds' tug-of-war rope looks like a rope.
• Uncle Jim's five least-picked send-off gifts were retuned.
• Keeper of Three Doors no longer tells you that switching wins two times in three.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 23 October 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

The browser version on itch.io is up to date again. 0.7.31 came out slightly too big for it and stayed on 0.7.30; 0.7.32 fits, so playing in the browser you get everything from both posts.

The lord who beats you finishes the job

When your last warlord falls, the fight used to just end. Now the camera dives in on the two of them, and the nearest lord still standing walks over and finishes the job their own way. There are 45 of these: one for every lord, one each for both Twins, and one for Wally's werewolf form. Your warlord's body stays on the table for the defeat screen, so a run that ends with you in a jar ends with the jar on the table.

Simple Ton grows back anything you cut off him. The warlord lops off his arm, it pops back, and three thumps of his log drive the warlord into the board like a tent peg.

Wally strolls over waving and offers a handshake. While they shake, his shadow stands up behind him as a wolf and bites, and Wally is mortified.

Silvertongue brings a snake-charmer's basket and plays the pungi until the warlord dances into it. The lid goes on, a little ajar on the crown.

Brother Clang counts to four. Every toll of his handbell rocks the warlord, and on four the great bell comes down over him. When it lifts he stands there ringing, then falls.

The Frost Yeti builds a snowman out of the warlord, carrot nose and all, flicks its head off, and the frozen warlord topples into the heap.

Calvin, Emperor of the Floe goes ice fishing. He thumps his sceptre until the floe gives under the warlord, hooks him out of the water, freezes him stiff and tosses him over his shoulder. If he has already woken as the Bear Beneath when he beats you, the bear bursts up through the ice instead.

The Broodmother drops in on a thread with a rolled-up newspaper and swats the warlord flat, like a bug.

The Fire Devil kept the snuffer from his own finisher. He lights the warlord like a candle, lets him burn down, and puts him out.

Never cut the Slime Lord. The warlord does, gets two of him, and they merge with the warlord inside. He comes back out of the top, slimed green.

Nine more of them: Rex Mortifer corks your soul in a jar, Grix the Goblin shakes you down by the ankles for your gold, Vitrix fires and glazes you until the top of you breaks off, The Lost Witch reads your ending out of her book, Hew, the Blade cuts once and your crown falls off in two halves, the Magma Magnate leaves you slag, Gorehoof's charge snaps your boar spear, The Mimic starts leading and you follow until you go down silver, and The Brass Colossus shovels you into its firebox.

Your fallen warlord also lies still now. The low-health shake used to keep going on the body after the last blow.

Banners tear in two

When a lord's banner has said its piece, it now tears in two down the middle, between the words and the lord, and the halves drop away out of the bottom of the frame with the fight already there behind them. Each lord's sheet comes apart its own way: Calvin's cracks along a floe line and the halves sink like ice, the Brass Colossus's shears like metal plate, the Elder Treant's splits like bark, Rex Mortifer's crumbles, Verdy B. Queen's parts along a scalloped edge, and the Magma Magnate's chars.

Every banner now hangs an opaque backcloth first, unrolled down from the top in a fraction of a second, so the board, the road and the nameplates never show through a painted sky. Rex's crypt and Winter's glacier used to let the road show through them for the whole banner.

The sets also answer the boss's blow when he slams. Wally's moon swells nearer with a ring of cold light round it, and every pair of shutters on his street bangs shut, house after house out from where he stands. Ton's sleeping troll-stones wake and glare, the Magma Magnate's volcano blows, the Twins' camps put up hedges of spears, and the Great Bloom bursts open with a puff of pollen off every flower.

Every break changes the arena

In 0.7.31 every lord with a phase break changed his arena at least once. The bosses have several breaks, though, and some of those still left the box alone. Now every break changes it, and the change stays for the rest of the fight. These are the new ones.

The Elder Treant ("The Forest Answers"): a crack runs out from his end along the mat's border, and wherever it reaches a root, the border splits and a great arch of bark rears up over the frame and comes down on the desk beyond. Saplings come up beside each tear. Each root comes up through a real tear in the felt: the cloth tents up, cuts run out from the middle in a star, it bursts, and each wedge flips back on its own hinge.

Verdy B. Queen ("The Great Bloom") empties her hive into the box. A ribbon of bees loops the mat's border and comes down at her end, where sheets of honeycomb rise one after another out of the border, the cells fill and cap course by course, and honey runs down over the edge. Her paper flowers burst open at its foot.

Rex Mortifer ("The Dead Rise"): a bony hand the size of a man grips the edge of his pall. His grave-light runs off both ways round the border, the graves give up their dead as it passes, and where the two lights meet, a mausoleum unfolds on the desk like a page of a pop-up book.

The Avatar of Winter ("Whiteout"): cracks run out from under him across the whole felt mat, and it freezes behind them plate by plate into pale teal ice, with ice spires rising in the margins.

The Magma Magnate ("The Field Ignites"): two long tears race round both sides of the board through his felt, with fire deep inside them and their torn lips raised. A few fires stay standing in them for the rest of the fight. At his last stand, "The Kiln Opens" now burns the mat down into the pit in cut-paper flame, where it used to be a speckled wall of fire that lapped over the roads.

The Brass Colossus ("Pressure Release") brings his plant up through the blueprint. Hatch lids blow off, and a tall riser, a boiler with a shrieking safety valve, a twin manifold on your flank and low vents punch up into the margins, gauges past the red and steam blowing. At "Foundry Override" a raised conveyor stands up beside him and runs his yard's cargo into a hopper.

Wally ("The Moon Answers") shuts his street round the box: a white picket fence clacks up round his knitted throw, picket by picket, with a gate in every run. It stays for the fight. By day its gates stand open, and at every moonrise they slam. At "The Blood Moon" the fence turns out to have been his all along: every other picket stretches into a curved fang, the ones between sink into a red gum, the corner posts thrust up as canines, and the whole jaw clenches once.

The smaller breaks don't pull the camera away

Most phase breaks change the arena in a small way: Ton's ruck, the Carrion Court's gallery, the Cursemonger's hex. Those used to pull the camera back and hold the fight while you watched. Now they play wherever your camera already is, with no pull-back and no wait of their own. The break itself still pauses for its stomp and its cards. The big changes, like the Foundry standing up or the board rising into the sky, still pull back and pause so you can watch them.

Several of them also got something new.

Simple Ton's stamp reaches the wall now. The tape on one side of his backdrop card lets go and flutters down to the desk, and the card hangs crooked for the rest of the fight.

The Cursemonger's hex used to be drawn in chalk. It runs in wet ink now, a bead at the head of each line and a pool where it stops, before the whole figure catches a sickly green light from the wax seals.

The Dread Court's fog of torn tissue has corpse-lights under it, glowing up through the layers like a bulb under tissue paper, and the room goes cold as it rolls in.

Wynken's dark seeps out from under his blanket as the crib mobile turns to its nightmare side, in three layers of cut paper with fingers curling out across the mat. Once the moon comes round, gold eyes open in it.

The Twins' camps pop up like a pop-up book before their volley: his red ridge tents in a row down the far margin, her blue pup tents scattered round her drum.

The Iron Wardens ("Close Ranks"): once Haldric's drawbridge is down, a column of his Shieldbearers marches out of the castle under the portcullis, over the bridge and across the felt, and halts as one in a wall of shields at his end.

Calvin's ice calves from the outside in. When a floe is marked to go, the mat round it breaks away into the sea first, and then the floe itself cracks into slabs that drift apart and sink one by one.

At Heartwood Unbound, the Elder Treant's last stand, the cloud used to be drawn over the board. Now the board climbs up into the cloud deck and breaks out of the top. His backdrop card falls with the wall at first, until the lifting branches catch it and haul it up after the board.

Nine new cards and a reworked one

• Executioner (Behind You!): two headsmen for 2 energy, with Free Deploy and Backstab. Every strike that leaves an enemy under 20 health has a 10% chance to execute it (15% upgraded), and an executed piece is cut clean through and slides apart. Lords can't be executed.
• Money Gun (Behind You!): a Money Gunner for 1 energy who hits harder than a 1-energy shooter usually does, and pays for it with 1 gold out of your purse for every 10 shots (15 upgraded).
• Body Snatcher (Behind You!): every unit it kills, it becomes. It sheds its old form like a torn page and stands up as a full-health copy of its victim on your side, still a Body Snatcher.
• Gatling Gun (Siege Works): a free-deploy machine gun with 45 health that winds up with Frenzy, up to six times its starting damage, and pays 1 health for every shot.
• Goblins in a Trenchcoat (Steel Legion): 1 health and Invulnerable 2. Every hit that reaches the coat lets a Coat Goblin out, even a hit Invulnerable cancels.
• Hat Collector (Final Rites): every ally that falls leaves it a hat, which goes on top of the ones it already wears. Each hat is +1 attack, and every point of damage knocks one off before it lands.
• Hungry Giant (Giantkind): an X card that eats every point of energy you have left and grows 50% bigger, in size and stats, for each one.
• Vampire Spawn (Bloodletting): two 1-health fledglings with Lifesteal 100% and Overheal, so they drink themselves bigger. At Unlock 12, each one splits in two at half health, and each half feeds and splits again.
• Pillar of Fire (Pyromancy): a beam of fire from the sky that burns whatever stands under it for 10 seconds. When its mark dies, it walks slowly to the nearest enemy and scorches a trail into the card behind it. Upgraded, it drops three.
• Engulfers (Slime Swarm) is reworked: three acid slimes for 2 energy with 12 health and no attack, Acid Aura 2, Pounce 4 and Ethereal. It used to be one big ooze for 4. Devouring Mass, its Pack Path card, is now the same three slimes, each bursting into two Slimelings when it dies.

The Executioner's cut, filmed with the chance turned up so that both strikes land it:

The Crayon Roads

A new event, from floor 3. A sheet of card as wide as a field lies across the road with toys standing on it, and a crayon the length of a lance. Pick up the crayon and you draw the fight's three roads yourself, from your flag to the lord's, round the toys and over the gold coins lying on the sheet, with only so much wax for each road. A road can double back on itself or go round in a loop. Then a knife cuts the sheet along your roads, the waste falls away, and you fight on what you drew. It works at a co-op table too.

The enemy's purse reads true

The enemy's energy now matches what it says. His purse tops out at the number the Compendium prints for him, a play he was handed for free prints 0 (and Exhaust, if he only gets it once a fight), and whatever he has left at the end of his turn he spends on units he can still afford. Simple Ton's hidden "every other round" rule is gone. His new power, Patient Lad, keeps his unspent energy for his next turn, so you can watch his purse climb past its usual 4 before he pays 6 for the Hulking Troll.

The Compendium

The Enemies section is laid out as a spread round the book's crease: the roster on the left page, each lord as an icon and a nameplate filed under Act 1, 2 or 3, the open lord's portrait beside it, and how they fight on the right page. In Cards, every pack is headed by its own nameplate and crest, and the folded packs are dealt two to a row across both pages.

Effects cut from card

Most of the effects that were still soft light are now cut from card like everything else on the board. The Siege Mortar's shell is a hand-cut iron disc instead of a drawn cannonball. Explosions throw cut smoke clouds, popping stars and confetti and leave a ragged scorch, instead of an airbrushed smudge. When a unit gains something, it gets a cut rosette and a sheet of tinted tracing paper instead of a glowing pool. The same goes for status auras, chain and live-wire arcs, the lords' salvos, spell families, storms, dice, telegraphs and finishers.

Less lag

A lot of this version went into the places where the game stuttered. Almost all of it draws exactly the same picture as before; it just stops doing work it didn't need to, or does it before you get there.

• Clicking into a fight no longer freezes the screen. The fight used to be built all at once when you clicked, so the map's photograph sat frozen for 280 to 410 ms. Now it is built a piece at a time behind that photograph, and the frame you click on takes about 22 ms. The shop, events, the campfire and the treasure room are built the same way.
• Your turn is smoother. The aiming lines for spells kept redrawing parts that weren't moving; now they only redraw what moves. On a busy turn against the Blood Hunt, a typical frame went from 17 ms to 10 ms. Pointing at a unit no longer hitches while its card is built, and the first moments of a turn with enemy spell warnings no longer stutter.
• Phase breaks are smoother. The worst were Verdy B. Queen's meadow, which held one frame for up to 197 ms, and the Brass Colossus's yard, whose heartbeat stalled the game every six to eight seconds for the rest of the fight. Both are fixed. Calvin's and Winter's banners, Bill's stampede, the Treant's autumn and Rex's descent are all much smoother, and the pictures for a boss's next form are prepared before his break comes.
• Moving between screens is quicker. Going from the spoils back to the map took up to 0.4 seconds and now takes a tenth. The Choose Your Warlord screen builds in a third of the time, and the game starts a little faster.
• The first fights on a new install. The graphics driver prepares each new kind of effect the first time it is drawn, which on a fresh install could catch a fight mid-turn. The desktop versions now do that while the map's photograph is still on screen, as the phone and browser versions already did.
• Spell lines no longer flicker. A lightning bolt bent at a sharp kink, or a charm, acid or dirge band on a short wobbly line, could lose a panel or its whole fill for a frame. Those pieces are now drawn in full every frame.
• On phones, several picture caches that kept everything for the whole session now let go of what they no longer need.

Smaller changes

• Devouring Mass is built from the new Engulfers (see above). Blade Master and Nightblade now field 3 units and Siren Sovereign 2, matching the cards they come from.
• Pyre Bats lose Flanker, so they go for the nearest foe instead of the farthest.
• From Ascension 7, the enemy card Waste Not's preview showed its Wasteland Psycho with 6 health when it actually arrives with 7. The preview now matches.
• In the browser version, the cut-out pictures on event pages are stored at the size they are drawn. They look the same in the itch.io window and in fullscreen on most screens, and a little softer in fullscreen on a 4K monitor.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 22 October 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

The browser version on itch.io is still 0.7.30. This build came out slightly too big for it, and it will follow once it has been trimmed.

Every phase break changes the arena

When a lord's health crosses a threshold, his banner goes up and the fight moves into its next phase. Six lords already changed their arena when that happened: Amanita's toadstools, Bill's stampede, the Magma Magnate, Verdy B. Queen, Rex Mortifer and the Mimic. In 0.7.31 the other 13 do too, each in a different way, so every lord with a phase break now changes the box he fights in.

They are all for show. Every break still does exactly what it did before (new units, a spell, a power), and none of those rules changed. Once the banner has gone, the camera pulls back to hold the whole box while the arena changes, then comes back to the fight. Whatever the change leaves behind stays for the rest of the fight. Each one is prepared in the background before the break comes, so it does not stall the game when it plays.

Simple Ton ("Ton Gets Mad") rears up and stamps, and a ruck runs out from under his end of the board through the blue felt like a kicked rug. The felt is left in folds and hummocks, its staked border dragged askew and the near corner flipped up off the desk. The board holds the felt flat under itself, so the lanes are untouched.

The Blood Hunt ("Blood Frenzy"): a wave runs out from the Houndmaster's end across the felt, the board, the desk and up his backdrop card, and leaves the whole box seen through a hound's eye at dusk, red and green fallen together into dull ochre and slate. Blood is the one colour left. Pools of it and the bodies standing in them keep their colour, and every Bleeding unit gives off a thin red scent trail that streams toward the nearest hound.

Wynken, the Dreaming ("The Dream Turns"): a child's crib mobile lowers over his night-sky card, a moon in a nightcap, sheep, gold stars and a wooden shoe on a cross of dowels, and the desk lamp dims to a night-light. As it turns, each piece twists round on its thread to the side printed on its back: the stars become eyes, the sheep become Sleep Demons, and last of all the moon grins with a mouth full of teeth. It keeps turning, nightmare side out, for the rest of the fight.

Blastcap, the Powder-Reeve ("The Powder Goes Up") has an accident. His powder stores cook off in the corner of his blanket: a bang, a shock of dust across the desk, and a column of paper smoke that fills the box. When it lifts, the blanket, the desk, the box and his card are blackened with soot, with a clean silhouette left wherever something was standing in the way of the blast.

The Iron Wardens ("Close Ranks"): Haldric's castle carries straight on out of both edges of his card, walls and towers springing up one after another along the box like a wave. A moat fills along the foot of the wall, and a drawbridge of corrugated card comes down across it onto his blanket.

The Carrion Court ("The Court Feasts"): the vultures and crows in the stands of the tournament on Cadric's card come off it in one stream, wheel over the box with their shadows racing across the desk, and drop out bird by bird to perch along the box's lid, the top of his card and the border of his blanket. They watch the rest of the fight from there, and every head turns when something dies.

The Lost Witch ("The Whole Book"): a gale comes out of her card, lifting its edges at the tape, and tears the pages out of her grimoire. They go round the box in a cyclone and then paper the wall, the border of her blanket and the desk. The odd page keeps tumbling, and the storm flashes now and then for the rest of the fight.

The Cursemonger ("The Ledger Comes Due"): salt pours itself in a ring round his blanket, and a chalk sigil draws itself across the felt stroke by stroke, his ledger's columns for spokes and the debt counted in tally marks between them. Wax seals press down at its points. It catches a sickly light that flares each time a curse lands in your deck.

Silvertongue's Racket ("Everything Must Go") puts the whole box up for sale. Price tags on red twine fly out of him and tie themselves onto everything that is not part of the fight: the props, the scenery, the corners of his card and the box, and the lamp, pencil pot, mug and cactus on the desk. Starburst sale stickers slap onto the box and his card, and a striped awning unrolls along the top.

The Dread Court ("The Court Convenes"): a cold bank of tissue-paper fog rolls out from under the box wall, closes round the board and pours over the front edge of the desk. Every paper piece standing on the stage bows toward him. Pale eyes open in the murk now and then, and the fog lies low for the rest of the fight.

The Pale Rider ("The Road Moves") already rode to another of his cairns at each break. Now his card rolls like the painted panorama behind a stagecoach, every layer at its own speed, the town fastest and the black sun barely at all, until it stops on another stretch of the Boneflats. With Reduce Motion on, the card turns over instead.

The Twins ("Back to Back"): a war horn sounds and the sky on their card goes dark. Both camps loose at once, Haft's red-fletched archers from the tents on the left and Hew's blue-fletched from the trees on the right. The two flights cross, hang over the box as one cloud and hail down on the whole stage, which bristles with arrows for the rest of the fight, each twin's on the other's half.

The Grave Tide ("The Tide Comes In"): a line of foam runs across the floor, the lamp's light turns to a net of drowned ripples, and the sea climbs the box wall and closes over the harbour on his card while the drowned church's bell tolls. Kelp grows up out of the corners of the desk.

Every card a phase break plays has its own name now, instead of all of them carrying the break's name. The Great Bloom used to put up three cards in a row all called The Great Bloom. Now they are Every Bud Bursts, Knee-Deep Flowers and Petal by Petal. That covers all 45 breaks that play a card, and no two cards in one break share a name.

A boss's health bar now grows under the number during his phase break. When a break gave a boss health back, the number changed straight away but the bar stayed at its old length until the fight started again.

Every act is its boss's land

An act used to be its region. Act 2 always opened on the same volcano, Uncle Jim walked up the same road, and the run map was the same sheet, whether the Magma Magnate or the Brass Colossus was waiting at the top. Now the place belongs to the boss who rules the act. There are eight lands:

• The Rootmire, the Elder Treant's (act 1)
• The Bloomfields, Verdy B. Queen's (act 1)
• Moonrise Valley, Wally's (act 1)
• The Cinder Caldera, the Magma Magnate's (act 2)
• The Siegeworks, the Brass Colossus's (act 2)
• The Barrow Vaults, Rex Mortifer's (act 3)
• The Winterwalk, the Avatar of Winter's (act 3)
• The Calving Sea, Calvin's (act 3)

Each land has its own name, its own cut-paper background and its own run map. The name shows on the act turn, at the head of the run map ("Act 2 of 3 - The Siegeworks"), on the loading screen and in your Steam status. Jim's walk-up and his check-in stand in the land, and the postcards in the tips and the road at the end of the victory and defeat films show the lands your run actually walked. Who you fight and the scenery of the fights still follow the act.

Every land has its own hand-drawn map sheet: a farm, barns and standing stones in Moonrise Valley, beehives in the Bloomfields, a crater split by lava in the Cinder Caldera, graves and a domed mausoleum in the Barrow Vaults. The boss stands on the open ground his sheet leaves for him, instead of on a strip across the top, and roads into a walled-in patch curve through its gap: up the glacier between the peaks in the Winterwalk, through the breach in the crater wall in the Caldera, over bridges in the Rootmire. His name plate hangs over his head now, not under his feet, and he stands a little taller.

The main menu stands in the land

When you have a run to continue, the main menu used to show one of three plates, one per act. Now it is a set built for the land your run is in, with two armies marching through it: yours, cast from the deck your run is carrying, and his, made of that boss's own units. Each set has its own roads, things to walk under and behind, and places to hop.

In the Rootmire, your column comes out of a hollow log, along a boardwalk on stilts and under the great root that arches over it, while his comes out of the root mound and hops the stepping stones across the black pool.

In the Cinder Caldera they come out of the mine and hop the basalt columns across the lava to the foundry gate. In Moonrise Valley they go through a covered bridge, seen through its windows, past a turning water wheel. In the Calving Sea they file out of a frozen ship's hold and go floe to floe while penguins slide and dive round them.

With nothing to continue, the menu used to be a brown cardboard valley on fire, with crowds printed into the picture. Now it is Two Kingdoms, in full colour: a green kingdom with a cream castle on the left, a crimson fortress on a black crag over lava on the right, and a keep burning between them. Nobody is printed into the picture; the only people are the game's own standees. Yours come out of the castle gate, down the road and over the bridge. Theirs come down the crag and hop three stones across the lava, while flaming shots fly between the two.

The treasure chest opens like a pop-up book

The treasure room's chest used to lift its lid as a squashed flat picture under one comic-book burst. Now the lid is hinged on the back of the box. The chest squats and strains three times, each strain lifting the lid a little further and showing the dark inside, and then the lid swings right over and stands open behind the box. A fan of card wedges springs up out of it, middle first, and punched card coins, paper gems and confetti fly out of its mouth, bounce once on the desk and lie there. When the relics come out, the chest folds flat into the desk. The boss chest does the same in violet, and the chests in the pick-a-chest event get the same fan.

The Mimic event's chest used to be a separate copy of the treasure room, and it had drifted: it was smaller, it did not stand in the vault, and it cracked open once where the real chest strains three times, which gave it away. Now the Mimic's chest is the real treasure room, so it looks and behaves exactly like a real chest right up to the moment the lid gives. Then the lid starts to open like an honest one, slams back down, the room goes dark, and the chest bites.

Reading the enemy's turn

Every card the enemy plays now comes up big, across the board from where it lands, with a line run out to its lane. The first time he plays a card in a fight, it waits under a slip that says "Click anywhere to continue" ("Tap anywhere to continue" on a phone, "Press to continue" with a controller), and the fight holds until you do. A card he has already shown you plays on a timer.

His energy stands beside him for his turn, on the same seal as yours. It fills to what he has before his first card goes up and counts down as he pays for each one, so you can see what he has left. The big card also carries the same keyword, status and terrain tips a card in your hand does. Before, a phase card could say "Opens Flower Meadow across every lane" with nothing to say what a Flower Meadow does.

If you would rather the enemy's cards just played, turn off Confirm new enemy cards in Settings, on the Game page. In co-op they never wait; they play on a timer.

Grix's pickpocket

Grix the Goblin's flanker used to be the Warren Skulker, a darker Warren Goblin. It is the Warren Filcher now. It has 16 health and never strikes, so your commander's Retaliate never answers it. It runs straight past your army to your commander, takes a card out of your hand or your draw pile, and runs it home for Grix to play for free. Then it goes back for another. Kill it on the way home and you get the card back.

Jim's room

Zoom the camera out of a fight and you see the room round the desk. Its furniture is drawn as solid pieces now, and each one throws its shadow from where it stands on the floor, away from the window. There is new furniture too: an armchair and a floor lamp, a chest of drawers, a map over the bookcase, a calendar, a plant, and a light in the middle of the ceiling that comes on after dark.

The room is dressed differently every fight: the season outside, and the street wears it too; a visitor in the tree, from robins to a kite to an owl at night; where the cat is sleeping; whether the door is open; the curtains, the shelves, the floor clutter and which tools are missing from the pegboard.

Your sign wears your colour

The King's and Queen's name sign was always crimson. Now its cloth is dyed in your player colour, which you pick in Settings or on the warlord screen. The default colour is Azure, so a King's sign is blue unless you change it. In co-op every seat's sign wears that seat's colour. The Queen's two small spiky crowns are gone, and she wears a proper tiara at each end of her sign.

On the warlord screen, Spin the Wheel now hangs under the little crank on the right of the stage.

Every range on the board

A player on a phone asked to "check the boundaries" of Pack Tactics. Its reach was only shown by hoops round the allies it counted, so you could not see where it ended. Now, when you point at a unit or tap it, every range it has is drawn on the board. Where Pack Tactics' reach crosses a road, its edge is laid across the road as a paper chain. The Goblin Shaman's Spirit Rites get the same edge as a pinked line. Pounce, a Contagion carrier's cough, Seismic Steps, Commander's Heart and a Grenadier's death blast are drawn too. The rings for a trap's tripwire, a Tank's shadow and a healer's mend were drawn flatter than their real reach, which goes nearly twice as far up and down the board; they are true circles now.

Thin Ice

Beating Calvin, Emperor of the Floe earned nothing in 0.7.30. Now it earns Thin Ice, and his defeat stamp reads SUNK. Grand Slam asks for all eight bosses. The Full Bestiary asked you to discover 35 lords while the game had 43; it now asks for every lord.

Smaller changes

• Hover, selection and focus are no longer ruled round in red. They are ringed by hand in red felt-tip pen instead: a text field while you type, a ticked box, the Cards page's toggles, a hovered power badge. The achievement toast, the Compendium's rows, the run summary's chips and the cream note under a relic or a potion are cut from card with their own shadow and no line round them.
• Turn starts are smoother. Card faces after a reshuffle, the roads' outlines and the long zoom's backdrops are made during quiet moments instead of on the first frame of your turn.
• Bill's stampede runs round the board, never over it, splitting round the lanes like a river round a rock.
• Calvin's lane lines are painted on after his floes land, instead of standing on the bare desk from the first frame.
• On an Android copy from itch.io, the game now checks for a newer Android version and tells you when one is out, with a link to get it.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 20 October 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

Calvin, Emperor of the Floe

Act 3's bosses were Rex Mortifer and the Avatar of Winter. Calvin is the third. He is a polar bear in a crown that is too small for him, with a herring speared on the end of his harpoon, and his whole army is penguins.

His fight is played on ice instead of cardboard. Five long floes of sea ice run from your berg to his over a navy wool blanket, and as he loses health the ice breaks up.

At 60% he brings a paw down and the desk under the board cracks. The cutting mat breaks off the edge of the table in shards and tips into the sea. There was water under the desk all along.

From then on the ice calves. Every 6 seconds the edge piece carrying the most bodies breaks off, and his Ice Sawyers saw loose the piece they stand on every 8 seconds. An edge piece never takes more than part of a lane, so a path is always left and the lane bends round the gap. At 45%, 30% and 15% a whole side floe goes, outer floes first. The centre floe never breaks, so whatever you put in the middle lane lasts.

Every break is warned. The piece is outlined with a glowing crack and a paper countdown strip runs down over it: 3 seconds for an edge piece, 8 for a whole floe. The countdown runs in battle time, so it holds still while you plan your turn.

Anything standing on ice that breaks away is lost. It does not die, so On Death does not fire and nothing is left behind. Flying units lift off and settle on the nearest ice. Penguins dive off, swim, and climb back onto the ice 3 seconds later, because Calvin's power, Born Swimmers, is active from the start.

His host:

• Waddlers come six to a card and are mostly there to be in the way.
• Tobogganers belly-slide in with Charge 4.
• Herring Hurlers stand at the back and throw fish that skip on to a second target (Chain 1).
• Divers are Flankers. They surface deep in your half and go for your commander.
• Ice Sawyers join once the ice starts breaking, with Armor 1 and Ice Saw.
• Emperor's Guards are armoured Tanks with 24 health.
• The Huddle is 52 health of penguins with Cleave, and six Waddlers come out of it when it dies.

His spell is Belly Flop. A giant emperor penguin drops belly first out of the sky onto the biggest crowd for 6 damage and shoves everything outward. A unit shoved off the edge of the ice is lost to the sea like anything else. His crown volley, Fish Supper, throws four frozen herring at your commander for 3 each, and every defender standing near your commander blocks one.

Each phase break brings more of his host. Breakup, at 60%, sends two Divers up deep in your half. Calving Season, at 30%, puts two Emperor's Guards in every lane and gives every unit he has +1 attack. Nothing in his kit slows, stuns or freezes, so the pressure in his fight is the ground shrinking under your army.

When you bring him down, the last side floe goes, his palace falls into the sea behind him and the ice gives way under his feet. He comes back up out of the water as the Bear Beneath: huge and hunched, with a mane of berg ice and a gold glow in his crown. He takes hold of the far end of the last floe with 21 health, hits your whole army for 3, and puts The Huddle in every lane.

From there the last floe rocks like a seesaw, one full rock every 5.2 seconds. Units walking downhill move up to 30% faster and units walking uphill up to 30% slower, so the fight surges back and forth along it. The Bear Beneath's spell, Heave, hauls his end under: the floe tips toward your end for 4 seconds and deals 3 damage to your units on it.

Click open water and the sea ripples. Dolphins leap, and leap again if you click them, a narwhal surfaces, an orca fin circles, a beluga comes up for air, a seal sits on its pan of ice and a paper boat rides the ripples. Every piece of ice that falls in and every penguin that dives makes its own splash and wake.

He has his own song, "Ice All the Way Down", a waltz for a ball held on the ice. In co-op each player gets three floes of their own and keeps their own middle one.

Cards cut from coloured card

Every card is now two plies of coloured card. The picture and the rules sit behind holes cut in the top ply, with the lighter ply showing round the edge of each hole. The name is on a folded paper banner whose tails tuck in behind the card. Nothing is clipped onto the banner any more: rarity reads from the stones at the foot of the card and from the banner's tint.

The colours are brighter too: orange for a summon, blue for a spell, green for a power and violet for a curse.

Full-art cards pop out

The game has 18 full-art cards, and until now 17 of them were flat paintings. Each of those has a newly drawn scene now, with its subject standing up out of it and over the top edge of the card. Uncle Jim's card already worked this way.

A summon's figure is the unit's own drawing from the field, so the card shows the unit you will get. Balor's card used to show a black devil that looked nothing like the little red one who came out. He has been redrawn as a pit lord, with bat wings thrown up, a crown of horns, a flaming greatsword and a burning whip, and his card shows that same figure climbing out of a fiery pit.

99 enemies drawn again

99 enemy units were still on drawings from August, and many of them were piles of small pieces that did not read at the size a unit stands on the field. Each one has been drawn again from scratch in flat paper, as one figure doing one clear thing. Four of the Brass Colossus's five works were variations on the same blocky brass robot. Now the Assembly Forge is a domed furnace with a crane arm, the Arc Coil a copper coil throwing sparks, and the Brass Sapper a goblin riding a bomb.

Two lords break differently

When Bill the Bull-Blooded reaches his second phase at half health, the camera pulls back to show the whole box. His war horn sounds, his backdrop card swells twice and bursts open in three bull-shaped holes, and 34 Gore Bulls and Blood Hounds pour out of them, across the mat, over the board and off the left of the table. Props standing in front of a hole are blown off the wall, and his card stays torn for the rest of the fight.

When Amanita, the Sporecrown, bursts at half health, her cap-stalk comes up out of the board, pale threads run down every road, and toadstools grow up along both sides of every lane: fly agarics, blue inkcaps, orange chanterelles, pink buttons, puffballs, and teal and lime caps that glow. They stay all fight, rocking and breathing, and now and then one puffs out spores. None grow in the middle of a road or on a summoning spot, and the ones nearest the camera stay low so they never hide a unit.

Both changes are for show. Neither phase's rules changed.

Two new cards from a player's ideas

Both of these came from ideas a player sent in.

Ironscale is a new Uncommon summon for the Steel Legion: an armoured war-lizard for 2 energy, with 24 health, 5 attack and Armor 1. It has Pounce 4, and every time it lands, every enemy near where it lands is Stunned for 3 seconds. Upgraded, it leaps further (Pounce 6) and Stuns for 4. Where it comes down, the road cracks and flaps of card tear up and slap back down.

Eater of Filth is a new Uncommon summon for the Slime Swarm: a slow, fat slime for 2 energy with 20 health and 3 attack, or 25 and 4 upgraded. Its Absorb Aura eats every stack of Poison and Contagion off the allies around it, your commander included, and it gains +1 attack and +1 max HP for each stack it eats, for the rest of the fight. There is no cap. In co-op it eats off your partner's units too.

Uncle Jim throws squirrels

Uncle Jim, the Legendary an event can give you, used to fight up close and breed squirrels. Now he stands at the back and throws them. Every 1.25 seconds a Squirrel flies down the lane and lands fighting, with 3 health, 3 attack and Pounce 3, and his squirrels' kills count as his. He talks now and then when one of them gets a kill, and usually has a last word when he falls.

Pieces fall flat

A unit cut down in a fight tips back off its feet, twisting as it goes, and falls flat on its back across the table with a slap and a small bounce before it is taken away. Before, it tipped sideways inside its own picture. A piece that changes direction turns round on its stand instead of flipping in a single frame.

Lane fronts and lord powers

Some lords cast a front that sweeps down the lanes and hits a set number of units before it stops: Fire Front, Caustic Tide, Whiteout, The Roots Reach, The Tide Comes In, Stampede and Keening Wail. Point at one and its card shows with a cut-paper slip under it, the number of units it has left in big cut figures over a chain of paper dolls, one per charge. Each time it hits a unit, a doll folds flat and the number balls up and opens out as the next one down.

An enemy lord's power used to be a square cream box in the top right corner. Now it is a paper slip with the power's punched counter laid on the end, the same counter your own Powers wear. It folds away under the counter and pulls out when you point at it.

Pack commanders in the Compendium

Each pack's commander, the warlord built from that pack's own body parts, now stands in a card-sized cut-paper scene as the first card of the pack's shelf in the Compendium. Paper arrows at his sides turn him round on his base through his three looks, Battleworn, Gilded and Ascendant. A look you have not earned yet stands as a black cut-out with a padlock on it behind a sheet of vellum. Stepping onto a look you own wears it for your next draft.

The galaxy, cut from paper

The galaxy at the far end of the long zoom is cut as layered paper now: each strip of an arm narrower and paler than the one under it, pink clouds along the arms where stars are being born, and a core of stacked hand-cut discs. The red map pin is gone. The sun is a small gold star that stays the same size on screen however far out you are.

Mac

A Mac player came back after three months, found the game unplayable, and wrote in to say so. On an M4 MacBook Air the warlord muster ran at 3 to 5 frames a second and a first-floor fight at 6 to 9. 0.7.27 and 0.7.28 fixed it:

• Macs draw without 2D edge smoothing (MSAA). On Metal it was costing nearly the whole frame: without it, the warlord muster went from 216 milliseconds a frame to 12.
• On every computer, the game watches its own frame rate. If a scene stays slow, it switches off edge smoothing, then the desk lamp's lights, then the warlords' cast shadows, one at a time, and keeps a change only if it was what was slowing the frame. On that MacBook Air the menus now run at 60 and a fight at 50 to 60.
• The game window sits below the menu bar and the camera notch. It had been losing its top edge under them, more than half the run header.
• The Mac download from itch.io opens after you unzip it in Finder. Before, the app lost its permission to run on the way out of the zip. Steam and the itch app were never affected.
• On a big screen, cards and pick screens can grow larger. On a 1920x1080 screen, a pick of three cards now fills about 62% of the width instead of 49%.

Android

The Android version of 0.7.26 to 0.7.28 closed on the loading screen every time it launched. 0.7.29 fixed that. Since then:

• On a phone, every word in the interface is at least a readable size, and every button is big enough for a thumb. Uncle Jim's sheets and event pages take the full width of the screen.
• The hand is dealt bigger and lower on a phone, with names readable while the cards sit there, and a tap lifts the card you can see under your finger.
• End Turn, the speed controls and the Deck and Discard piles are thumb-sized.
• Long sessions no longer run the phone out of memory. Before, every fight left a little more memory in use, until the phone closed the game.
• If the game does crash on a phone, the next launch sends a report of where it stopped, so it can be found and fixed.
• The long zoom out past the desk is a desktop feature for now.

Two settings were reset

• Auto-play cards is off for everyone, once, on every platform. It is meant to stay off unless you choose it, and it had been found on in settings where nobody remembered turning it on. If you had turned it on yourself, turn it back on in Settings.
• Auto End Turn is back on for every profile (since 0.7.28). The switch to on by default in August only reached brand-new profiles. Anything you set from now on sticks.

Smaller changes

• A quick double tap or click on a slow device could take a reward twice, such as two relics from one treasure room. Every screen that hands out a reward now answers one tap: the treasure room, the shop, the campfire, card picks, relic picks, event choices, Jim's Junk Drawer, the Eternal's shelves and the brazier.
• Uncle Jim's tip over your hand: "Got it" now closes the tip instead of picking up the card under it.
• The fire in the shop recommends burning one of your warlord's own opening cards before a pack's Starter.
• Nobody pops up on the main menu's signpost until every board has been hung.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 20 October 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

The Turnabout Show

A new event, in co-op only. A troupe's wagon folds down into a little stage, and three boxes hang over it on ropes.

One of you steps up and hits all three. The two boxes on the ends spin through the warlords at the table. The middle one spins through what passes between them: gold, a relic, a card or max HP, given left to right, right to left, or swapped. The first box spins slowest, and each one that lands speeds up the rest. Whatever the boxes say happens, for good.

Gold moves the giver's whole purse. A relic or a card is one at random, never a warlord's signature relic, never a Curse, and never one of the basic cards a warlord starts with. Max HP moves a quarter of the giver's ceiling, and a swap trades the two ceilings outright. When one warlord has nothing of that kind to give back, the show says so and the swap goes one way.

AI warlords at the table are on the drums too. If the player whose turn it is walks away, the host's game hits the boxes after 30 seconds.

Four lords with a new trick

Ten lords in acts 2 and 3 fight differently now. Four of them needed something no other lord has.

• The Frost Yeti tears a rock out of the ground every 6 seconds and throws it at your frontmost unit for 4 damage. He never aims it at your commander. His book also opens on round 2, with Blizzard first.
• The Grave Tide's shore has Salt Water: a Bleeding unit takes 1 damage every second while it bleeds. The Tide Comes In opens on round 1 and Undertow on round 2.
• Brother Clang's bell has Ringing Ears: when a Stun wears off, the unit takes 2 damage. It works on his Stuns and on yours.
• The Fire Devil has Infernal Hide. A unit that hits him catches Burn 2, at most once every 3 seconds, so a cheap swarm is the wrong finisher.

The other six fight differently with the cards they already had:

• Hoarfrost sends a pair of Rime Shrikes at your commander on most rounds.
• The Warsmith's Rolling Cannons bombard your commander.
• Sledge Hammarsson's book and Skyfall both open on round 2.
• Mum, the Word brings the Mute Bell and Every Word Unsaid on round 2.
• Ossric fields four Bone Rattlers a card, and Bone Shrapnel comes on round 2.
• The Brass Colossus hunts your commander with Sappers, opens Foundry Barrage on round 1, and Foundry Override no longer plants forges.

The Compendium's strategy notes for all ten describe the fights as they are now, and the lord pages read their flavour and strategy in your language instead of always in English.

Ascension 7 ("Enemies are harder") makes enemy numbers 15% harder, and now it reaches the ones it used to miss: the Lightning Storm's bolts, the Ash Witch's Meteor Strike, the stomp that opens a boss phase, the commander's own strike back, Wally's attacks, and the damage a unit deals when it dies, from traps, from auras and over time. The four new effects harden too, so the Yeti's boulder hits for 5.

The Masked Challengers each have something to say when the other one falls. All nineteen lords the pair can be drawn from have three lines of their own. Grix wants the fallen one's shinies, the Slime Lord absorbs the puddle, and the Broodmother has the body wrapped for later.

The films move

The pop-up book films that end a run used to hold one wide shot on each page for 8 to 15 seconds. Now the camera sits down near the page, pushes slowly in under each line, walks along the road with your warlord, and goes in to each punchline's gag as it lands.

Every line now lands on a picture of itself. In a lost run, the page of the lord's own world does what the narrator says, on the word it is read. A moon on an arm swings up over the back wall for Wally, the Dreamer and the Pale Rider. Snow, coins, goblins and cannonballs drop and lie where they land. The crowd kneels, hops on a hot floor or nods off, and two-sided cards turn round: Wally's neighbours are wolves on their backs, and Wally turns into Were-Wally on "hairy".

The confetti is cut paper now, strips and stars fired from two poppers. Each piece tumbles through the lamplight and settles on whatever page is under it. Turn the page and the confetti on it tips into the gutter.

A few more changes to the films:

• A defeat film opens with your warlord head first in a puddle, boots in the air, kicking on "mud".
• Lose again within a week and the defeat film runs a short cut of about 22 seconds: the lord's crowning, the lord's line about what became of the land read over it, and the book shutting. A week away from the game and the whole film plays again.
• The last page ends the way the story did. After a victory the banners going up are your march's own packs'. After a defeat, the crowned usurper stands over your fallen warlord, totters on "stands" and goes over on "for long", and your warlord gets back up among the banners on "the war began again".
• The captions ride in on the letterbox bars instead of appearing before the bars arrive.
• The book lies on the desk with a tape roll and a pair of scissors beside it, lit by the same lamp.

A wake for a lost run

The defeat recap used to stand your warlord alone. Now your whole army gathers round in a huddle a few ranks deep, and everyone cries. In co-op every warlord stands at the front of their own army.

The long zoom goes further

Scroll out past the stars and there is a galaxy now, cut from paper and seen nearly face on, with a map pin two thirds of the way out along one arm where the sun is.

The desk underneath the fight is a workbench now and looks less like a bed. A shelf under the top holds a roll of kraft paper, flattened cartons, three tins of paint, a shoebox of spares and the toolbox. It stands on four pairs of legs, bare wood shows round a smaller cutting mat, and Jim's chair is pulled out in front of it with his cardigan over the back.

Out on the loop, a click goes to whatever is under it. The cat wakes up, stretches, yawns and lies down again. Jim at his mailbox gives a little hop to say hello. Click the moon and the cow jumps over it. The tardigrade in the paper squashes flat, turns round and walks back the way it came.

The sound changes with distance too. The fight's music is heard through the room's window, muffled, then quieter, and gone by the town. Each stop has a quiet loop of its own: the clock ticking in the room, birds in the street, wind over the fields, a low hum in space and a fizz and crackle inside the paper.

If a lord falls, a phase turns or the fight ends while you are out there, the loop rewinds to the desk in six tenths of a second, every stop flashing past, instead of cutting.

Closer stops now open in a hole torn in the picture, with a ragged paper edge, instead of a soft-edged rectangle. The big stars glow softly into the card round them. Jim at his mailbox, the framed pictures on his wall and the billboard downtown had been showing as blank white cards, and they show their pictures now.

Go all the way round, either way, and you get a new hidden achievement. That makes 93.

Everything Burns

A new Rare power for the Pyromancy pack. Every debuff you put on an enemy becomes that much Burn instead. For a debuff measured in seconds, like Stun, Fear, Slow, Silence or Madness, the seconds become the Burn. It pairs with Wasting, which lays a lot of debuffs.

In co-op, Everything Burns only converts the debuffs its own player lays. The same goes for every power and relic that works off what is on an enemy: Funerary Wraps, Slow Burn, Virulent Strain, Second Crack, Contagion and the rest each read only their own player's stacks now, so your partner's Poison stays Poison.

Field Forge

A new Uncommon spell for the Steel Legion. For 1 energy it upgrades every other card in your hand for the rest of the battle, then Exhausts. Upgraded, it costs 0. The upgrades come off when the fight ends, so your deck is as it was.

The Vivisectionist shows his work

The Vivisectionist's four surgeries used to be four text slips beside a soldier you never saw. Now each one is dealt as your soldier's own card, showing what that surgery would do to it: a green number for a gain, a halved one in the stat-down colour, a new Armor or Charge line, a speed or reach row with its pips moved and washed in colour. A manila tag tied to each card's foot names the surgery. The price page does the same, with the gift you chose already on the card.

Paths in the Compendium

At levels 4, 5 and 6 a pack swaps one of its cards for a stronger one from the Path you choose. Until now you only saw those cards one level at a time, in the chooser. The Compendium's Paths tab is an index of every pack with Paths now, one slip of card each, with its level, its three level tabs and the Paths you took. Packs with a choice waiting wear a "Choose" note and come first.

Open a pack and its spread shows all three levels at once: the card both Paths replace in the middle, an arrow out to each Path's card, and each Path's name in the margin. The arrows say Choose, Current or Switch. A level the pack has not reached is pencilled in with a padlock and still shows both cards, and every card grows to reading size under the pointer.

Seven relics with jobs of their own

Paste Pot is a new Rare relic: the first hand you draw each battle is upgraded for that battle.

Six other relics were smaller copies of another relic's effect. Hearthkeeper's Kettle was a weaker Feather Bedroll, Merchant's Signet a smaller discount than Regulars' Tab, and so on. Each does something no other relic does now.

• Hearthkeeper's Kettle: heal 15 when you enter a Merchant.
• Surgeon's Tent: heal 5 when you reach an event.
• Paymaster's Strongbox: whenever you gain a relic, gain 20 gold.
• Merchant's Signet: merchants sell upgraded cards, the face-down one included.
• Alchemist's Bandolier: gain a random potion when you reach an Elite or a Boss.
• Compound Interest, one of Uncle Jim's gifts: after every battle, gain 2 gold for every battle you have won.

Smaller changes

• Every event's closing lines move again. 176 of them had lost their animated words, and event text has four new motions: coins and bells jingle letter by letter, candles flicker, blood and rain drip, and anything hanging sways.
• In co-op, each partner's relics sit at the end of their row on your screen, and pop when they fire.
• In co-op, Pass the Parcel, The Sleeping Hoard and an ally's "backs this" note name each warlord by their painted nameplate instead of a typed name.
• In the shop, once you burn a card, the fire by the counter shows the card that went in, even after a save and quit.
• A relic or event that changes your max HP rolls the health bar in front of you, wherever it happens, instead of snapping it.
• Cards flying through the air are drawn whole. Three cards in flight at once used to print one card's name banner across the next one's picture.
• A unit's hover card shows its banked gains, so a Willing Vessel fed three pages reads Fragile 4, the way it strikes.
• The Wailing Spirit stops wearing the Ghost's painting.
• A squad of Fire Tornado is "Fire Tornadoes" now.
• On a short screen, the War Council's join plate folds into a "Join a Game" tab beside the console.
• On a controller: a card an event gives you and an egg hatching now rumble the pad, a treasure room puts the cursor on its chest, and backing out of "Upgrade this card?" puts it back on the card you were looking at.
• The builds are about 10 MB lighter. They had been carrying files the game never reads.
• Open the Graves has its own picture: a grave dug open with the coffin lid propped on its stone.

The game's site has a privacy page now, at [pbandgames.com/privacy](https://pbandgames.com/privacy/). It says what the game sends home, how to turn it off and how to have it deleted.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 15 October 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

The Cyborg

He is the fourteenth warlord. Half his body is other people's work and so is half his army. He starts with 100 health, four Chrome Troopers, two Arc Gunners and a Reclaimer, and his signature relic is the Copy Chip. Every enemy commander he beats leaves him one of that commander's own cards. After the fight the spoils writ carries a "Salvage from" row for each commander that fell, and claiming it offers three of that commander's cards to keep one. A salvaged card Exhausts when it is played. Forge it at a campfire and it stops Exhausting.

The Reclaimer does the same on a small scale. Whatever it kills comes back to your hand as a free card that summons a hollow copy of that body.

He unlocks once you have felled 50 enemy commanders across all your runs.

Every new warlord has a reveal

Unlocking a warlord is its own scene now. The warlord's stage comes up lit low behind a black standee, its outline is traced round while the lamp comes up and a burst of cut paper opens behind it, and then the warlord burns in from black, dances, slams down a name sign, and lays out the signature relic on one side and the starting deck on the other. All thirteen unlockable warlords have a stage of their own for it.

Each of them also has a Steam achievement now, thirteen in all, with the warlord's own bust in front of their own place on the icon. That brings the game to 92 achievements.

The Tinker's Workshop

A new event, from the second leg of an act on. The tinker has a bench, a plain Recruit and a box of crayons.

At the bench you turn the soldier's health, attack, how many come and what it costs up or down, make it melee or ranged, and bolt on up to four parts from a tray of six. The tray leans towards the packs you drafted, and rummaging for a fresh one costs 10 gold, then 5 more each time. Every press of a dial reprices the soldier, and the price comes out of your purse. A plain Recruit costs only the bench fee, 25 gold, and a copy of the Cavalry card comes to about 63. Turning a stat down gives gold back.

Then you draw it. The sheet stands in a disc stand next to a box of twelve crayons, three line widths, an eraser and undo, and the card and a patch of field beside it change with every line.

Name it and throw the big switch. The drawing is the soldier from then on: on the card, in your hand and standing on the field. The whole design is kept in the card, so it comes back with a saved run and a co-op ally sees the same drawing on their own screen.

Every run ends on a film

Beat the last boss and the crowning freezes as the crown lands. That frame becomes the back wall of a toy theatre, and the camera pulls back out of it into the book from the intro.

The narrator tells what happened next. Your warlord and party walk the road of the march and each boss you beat folds flat as their name is read.

The crown goes on in place of your warlord's hat, with the whole party and your army either side.

Then there is one page for each pack you drafted, saying where its people ended up.

The peace does not last. The book's back cover comes over and the camera goes down onto the poster pasted on it, which is the run's recap screen, while the title theme sings "Cardboard Conquest" to finish the narrator's last line. At Ascension 10 a gold statue of your warlord stands on the crowning page.

Lose a run and the same book tells it the other way round. You look over the board that beat you, press March On, and the film starts.

Your warlord and party charge the lord who beat you. The lord takes the blows, then rises on a strip of card and comes down on top of you.

The Cardboard Crown goes on the lord's head in a hall of their own, the sun gone red, the banners wearing the lord's face and you lying flat at the foot of the steps. The lord's own theme song plays from there.

The next page is the lord's own world, filled with their army, and one line about what became of the land under their rule. All 42 lords have a line of their own.

Then the war comes back, the book shuts, and the defeat page is the poster on its back cover. Both films can be skipped.

The long zoom

In a fight, scrolling out used to stop at a fixed distance. Now the wheel gives at that point, holds for a few notches, and lets go. The camera keeps pulling out: the desk, the room it stands in, Uncle Jim's window, his street, the town, the country, the planet, the moon, the sun's planets, the stars, and then dark, which turns out to be the inside of an atom. Out of that come molecules, the fibres of the paper and the middle of the fight you left. Zooming in past the closest point runs the same trip the other way.

Every stop is cut from paper, and there are things to find on the way: the real time on Jim's clock and in the sky, the moon in its real phase, Jim at his mailbox, a cow jumping over the moon, a heart on Pluto, a tardigrade in the paper grain.

The fight stands on a whole desk now: a walnut bench of a real width with a front, drawers and legs, a big cutting mat with its ruler printed round the edge, and a back wall that is the side of one long carton, its lid taped shut and shipping marks on its ends. Past where the old zoom stopped there is a mug going cold, a pot of pencils with the craft knife in it, a roll of masking tape, a steel rule, a stack of the game's own cards and the anglepoise lamp the board is lit by.

The Crispy Kiwi

New in 0.7.24: an Uncommon for the Wild Pack, and the pack's first ranged body. It is one bird for 1 energy, with 16 health and 5 attack. When it kills something it takes it prisoner, and a 0-cost card that summons a hollow copy of that body, at half its health and attack, lands in your hand. A second kill of the same kind adds one to the card you already hold. A captured card lasts until the end of your next turn and never goes into your deck.

Ascension 10's second throne

The Twin Thrones rung used to field the other boss of the final act on his normal numbers, so the last fight of the hardest run was one of two fights every time, and usually the easier half of its own gauntlet. The second throne is now any boss your march has not beaten, from any act, in a stronger form of their own: the longest health bar of the run (never under 60), six energy a round, every body they field made bigger, a 3-cost card at the end of each row of their pattern, and one more phase break built from their own motif.

The Compendium's Ascensions tab is a pop-up spread too. The left page stands up as a cut-paper mountain with one summit per rung: a gilt flag on every rung you have conquered, a teal pennant and a map pin on the one you can march at now, and a pencil-sketched flag on each rung still ahead. The right page lays the ten rungs out as slips of card, each saying what its twist does and the pack XP it adds.

The interface is cut paper

Most of the words in the game already unfolded from balls of paper. Over these three builds most of the rest of the interface followed them.

Your Turn and Enemy Turn arrive on a paper ribbon with cut-paper letters.

Buttons letter their words in the cut paper face. So do DEFEAT, the act titles, a boss's phase title, the run bar's readings, the energy seal, the pile counts, the recap's figures and headings, and the numbers on a card's cost seal, heart and attack burst.

The title screen's options are a signpost: arrow boards hung on a kraft post in the field, pointing left and right by turns. Point at Continue or New Game and two soldiers from your own army pop up and hold the board up. The Compendium comes out of its own board.

Event pages are a taped sheet on a mat with the picture in photo corners, and the choices are tabbed paper slips. Uncle Jim's send-off and check-in are cut the same way, on his moss-green mat.

Relics are pins on index cards. Wherever a relic is offered it is a ruled index card with an enamel pin pushed through it. Take it and the pin is pulled out, leaving a hole in the card, and flies to your relic bar. Potions stand as the flask itself, big, and lean like a card.

The spoils of war have a pop-up spread of their own, and the spoils list is a taped writ standing on it, with "How was that fight?" as five paper slips at its foot.

The shop

The shop was rebuilt from scratch. Its wares are one display: cards on top, relics on index cards and flasks on the desk under them, laid out from the size of your screen, so a phone's stall stands bigger than before. The section heads are paper slips taped to the stall. Burn a Card is a little fire of craft sticks and paper flames at the corner of the counter, with a card going in. The card is the worst curse in your deck if you have one, otherwise a starter. Leave the Shop is a ribbon pinned to the front of the counter, and the squirrel naps on top of the counter.

The draft and the warlord wheel

The pack draft stands in a paper pavilion. Its roof holds the packs you have chosen, its open front frames the three on offer, and your commander waits on the grass at the left. Each pick dyes the trim under its slot and a third of the bunting in that pack's colour.

When you lock in, a paper sunburst opens behind your commander, who now stands between two marching standards in your banner colour. They throw confetti when you point at them and dip in salute when you March on.

Then each crest dives into your commander, who charges the screen. The screen turns out to be a paper banner on two dowels standing on Jim's land, and your commander bursts through it. An Eternal tears the paper open onto the void instead.

The warlord wheel is a cardboard contraption: a corrugated platter cut as a cog on a ribbed drum, turned by a chipboard pinion with a paper-dowel crank, in front of a paper country of hills, tents and bunting. A blue Spin the wheel ribbon beside Back picks a warlord you can march as and sends the wheel the long way round to him.

In the fight

Switcheroo opens a blue portal and an orange one. Every body it trades drops through one and comes up out of the other, and then marches down the road it came up on instead of walking back to its old one.

Colossal Stomp brings down a giant's foot cut from card, its leg tied off with rope and patched. The toes slap and wriggle, and clods and dust fly out from under the sole.

Pollen Choke is a pop-up flower pumping a cloud of the queen's gold paper over the road. Choking Bloom shares it, and Spore Bloom, Pandemic and Quarantine get a violet cloud.

Storms and lightning lay cut-paper ground on the lanes, and so does the Overwatch zone. A spell landing, a hit or a blast kicks up paper offcuts where it used to draw a ring.

An Undying body's refused death plays out: it goes over, a gravestone stands up behind it and cracks, and its soul is reeled back in.

When a standing rule acts (the Long Night, Permafrost, Kiln-Glaze, the Mimic spending your Conscription and the rest), its chip lifts off the board with a cut-paper star behind it and hangs its name on a tag.

A lord's mark on the ground is a torn sheet now, and Rex Mortifer's staff tears a grave in the board in his opening taunt. The sigil of his Second Death appears under his feet.

His Second Death now starts as a kill. The kill lens dives on him and your warlord charges in. Rex catches your warlord by the throat, says his line and throws them back home before the Second Death's banner goes up.

• A battlecry with a reach (grenades, colours, a war cry, a patch-up) is aimed like an area spell: a ring shows where it lands, every body it will touch is outlined, and a count hangs over it. The ring is red where it harms and green where it helps, and it counts exactly the bodies the cry will reach.
• A body that is immune to everything a spell or flask would do to it is no longer lit or counted when you aim.
• When an Adventurer reaches a new level he crouches and springs, a ladder of chevrons climbs him and a gold star turns over above his head. His card reads "Level 5 Adventurer" from then on.

Every lord taunts in their own way

When a lord taunts you, the note they speak on is cut, delivered and dressed in a way of their own. The Fire Devil's note burns in from his head and burns away to char. The Slime Lord's splats down and melts. The Mimic's is a mouth with a tongue for a tail. Rex Mortifer's unrolls on a scroll, the Broodmother's is lowered on a thread of silk, Verdy B. Queen speaks from a honeycomb cell, and Silvertongue hands you a receipt. Every lord, both Twins, Wally after dark and all 21 packs have their own, and each member of a Masked Challenger pair speaks as itself.

Co-op

When every seat has drafted, everyone's arm reaches in from their own edge of the screen, cut from their own warlord's sleeve, with yours coming up from the bottom and on top. The hands press down once, make fists, and each rips its own piece of the draft back off its own edge onto Jim's land.

Pressing Co-op on the title screen now photographs the title and folds it up like a fan. A pair of scissors cuts a figure out of the stack, and it opens across the War Council's table as four paper dolls joined at the hands, which hop down the line and run off as the council lands behind them.

The Sleeping Hoard is a new co-op event for the whole party. A dragon sleeps on a ledge above the road, and every time it snores some of its gold slides off the lip. The party stands together on a long plank balanced on a spire of rock, each with a basket on their head, and catches what falls for 40 seconds. Every coin makes its carrier heavier and the plank tips towards the heavy side, so someone has to walk the other way. An end that bangs down on the rock stirs the dragon, and the third bang wakes it, and its fire burns half the catch. The catch is shared evenly, and a good haul adds a prize. AI warlords play it too, and answer calls.

Pass the Parcel is the other new co-op event. The postmistress sits the party round her table, every warlord wraps one card from their own deck for the next seat, and everyone opens the parcel from the seat before them at the same moment.

Watching an ally, their card picks, relic picks, shop and events are dealt again on your desk at full size beside their stream, where you can read them, hover them and recommend one. The stream zooms with the wheel, a double-click or a pinch, with a small map in the corner.

On a phone

On a phone the game reads at a phone's size: interface type is cut 15% bigger, cards lift bigger, pick screens fill more of the screen, grids go to four columns, and the enemy's record, its telegraphs and an ally's card are readable. On a 16:10 tablet the colour chips on the character screen move out of the ascension card's way. The intro book and both epilogue films now play on Android.

New drawings

Six Path evolutions that wore their base card's picture have their own now: the Flame Adept holds one forked flame, the Dire Wolf is the Pack Wolf gone black-backed and scarred, the Bone Gatherer is the Bonehoarder built bigger, the Garroter has the wire raised, the Murmuring Scribe reads aloud from an open book, and the Venom Stinger is a hornet with its sting curled forward. The Sanguine Thrall has its own drawing, corpse-pale and fanged with a whetted falx. The Beatdown Cop is the InvestiGator now, a bull alligator in plain clothes. The Adventurer's cap is one long cone, and his flavour line is "The missing link in every front line." The Broodmother's newspaper is a rolled newspaper.

Events

The Poison-Seller's Cart has a new theft. Pick "Try to lift a bottle" and her stall is drawn as a market stall with a striped awning, bottles of every shape and a cauldron she stirs over a fire. Hold the button and your arm creeps out from behind a barrel. She glances back now and then while still stirring, which is safe, but when she stops the ladle and turns you have to let go, or her hand closes on your wrist.

Every result page of every event turns to a picture of its own now. The last 94 were cut this week, which makes 357.

• The Last Duel at Sundown ends in a gunshot: once the coin lands on "Draw, then.", a revolver cracks before the page turns.
• Uncle Jim's coin of fate is a punched chipboard token tossed onto the desk.
• One of the Magpie King's caches holds a relic, with confetti when it turns up.
• The joust's "Just enjoy the show" row shows what it pays (+6 HP) instead of a percentage.
• When you gain a new piece for your warlord, it is pressed out of its sheet on a cutting mat, turns over in the air and lands where it is worn, knocking off what it replaces.
• The Vivisectionist's and the Charmwright's pick pages cut their choices like an event's own slips.

At the Eternal's void, a relic you pick lifts out of the list under "Take this relic?", with Take it and Choose another. Taken, the card is drawn into the Eternal's head before the relic comes out of it.

Balance

• Ascension 7 is now Enemies are harder: from the seventh rung up, every enemy body, commander health bar and enemy spell is 15% stronger, and that includes what a Mimic reflects, a grave exhumes and a host raises. The rare-card squeeze it replaces is gone. The bestiary prints the numbers for the rung you are marching at.
• Balor has Blood Price 5: summoning him costs 5 health on top of his 3 energy.
• The Blood God's Wheel takes half the health you have left at every spin, rounded down, instead of a flat 5.
• A flat health price on an event row is charged again. Since an earlier fix it had been printed on the receipt and never taken, so the Demon's nip, the Molten Crucible and the Blood Tithe Font's repeat round were free.
• No event can take a commander's last point of health.
• Valet Service deals a card reward when you Rest, in place of the bigger heal it used to give.
• Pack Tactics prints the most armor it can give, and its upgrade doubles that too: +1 (max +3) becomes +2 (max +6).
• Reassemble: a titan fused from different death-summoners dies into every one of them, instead of only into the last one's summon.
• Auto-play cards aims a battlecry at the bodies its ring reaches, plays cards in an order that sets them up, and lands a helpful area spell where it does the most.

Small things

• The Hoard Wyrm's attack shows its gold, in hand and on hover.
• The brazier on the burn screen is cut card: paper flames in a grey card dish on crossed craft-stick legs, and the card goes down into the bowl to burn.
• The Full Wasting achievement asks for any 4 different debuffs on one enemy at once. It used to name a fixed four.
• The bar at the top of a battle leaves half a second into the opening, so the backdrop card is clear while the stage builds.
• The battle's feedback button is a half-written note with the quill writing it.
• A relic you gain flies off the card you are reading it on, at the size it is drawn there.
• The recap's Relics Gathered plaque opens the relics you ended the run holding.
• The boss landmarks on the chart are engravings.
• The chart reads and draws the stage of the fight you are walking towards while you walk, so the fight starts sooner.
• A big crowd of bodies with status effects costs less every frame.
• Hall of Mirrors copies stand up by the Mimic.
• The flying book in the intro casts one soft shadow.
• Pick screens no longer have see-through holes in their pieces: the boss's card reward hall, the hatchling lab's floor and bookcase, the apothecary's bottles and four more.
• The shadows on a pick screen's spread all fall down and to the left, and stay on the page when it leans.
• Uncle Jim's line round your hand goes round each card's own outline.
• The ranks lesson film was reshot so it shows why the Archers stand behind the Recruits.

In the browser

The pop-up book intro and both epilogue films are in the downloadable game only.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 14 October 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

Every lord hits back

Until now a lord's answer to a blow was the same short lunge on every one of them. Now each lord has a wind-up, a strike and an impact cut from paper in their own colours, sized to read at the distance you play from. Each one also has an extra beat. It comes on the first strike (or the second) and every third after that, never on every blow: Sift flips a coin back over his head, the Fire Devil flicks his contract at you and it burns, a daisy springs up where Wally's water landed.

The rest of the roster has theirs too. Gorehoof drops his head and hooks both tusks up through whatever is in front of him, then stands there and snorts. Simple Ton lets his log fall flat on you and an egg hops out of the nest on his head. Blastcap throws a lit stick of dynamite end over end and lights the next fuse off his helmet candle. Warlord Ash swings his torch round and a bone flips off it into his loot sack. Haldric slams his tower shield forward, and now and then his old kettle helm rocks down over his eyes.

Bill the Bull-Blooded chops his cleaver into the ground and tosses his horns. Vitrix slaps a molten gather on you that cools to glass and shatters. Mum swings her birdcage up into you and slaps two strips of tape across you in an X, and once in a while her canary gets out and flies a lap. Haft stamps his tower shield down and drives in a pennant where the line now is, and Hew leaves an X with her sword and a knife. Perihelion comes down on you like the star it is. Wynken kicks in his sleep and a counting sheep bounds off the bed head first. Silvertongue strikes like a snake and leaves a price tag swinging. The Avatar of Winter stops you in a block of ice, and in its second body it rakes you with three hands. The Mimic throws your own punch back at you.

Every form a lord takes keeps the blow: the woken Magnate, Rex and Verdy, the Foundry Titan with his bigger fist, and both of Wally's wolves, who rake three tears down through you.

A pop-up book before the title

The game now opens on a book. The lamp comes on over the desk, the cloth-and-foil cover opens, and four spreads fold up out of the pages while a narrator reads, with each word of the caption unfolding from a ball of paper just ahead of him saying it.

On the last page the camera goes in through a cardboard stage, the title theme comes in singing "Cardboard Conquest" as the sign drops, and the page you were looking at turns out to be the title screen itself.

It plays on every launch of the desktop game. Press any key once and it offers "Press again to skip"; a second press skips it. The volume keys, media keys and the mouse wheel do not count as a press. With Reduce Motion on, it does not play.

Uncle Jim's notes instead of Act 0

Act 0, the guided march through Jim's woods, is gone, along with its two scripted fights and the menu's "First march?" question. New Game now goes to the muster, the pack draft, Jim's send-off and act 1, the same march a veteran plays.

Uncle Jim now says what needs saying, on paper. Eleven notes go up, one at a time, on the real screens as you reach the thing they are about: pick 3 packs, sign your name, 3 acts to the crown, break their warlord, drag a card to a spot, 3 energy a turn, End Turn starts the fight, pick your speed, archers behind fighters, guard every lane, flankers skip the line. Each is a sheet with a name, at most one line, and a short film of the thing being done. What a note points at gets one pale line round its shape. A note never stops the game.

"Got it" puts one note away. "No more tips" puts them all away, and Uncle Jim comes through at a run and takes the note with him. Settings has a box, "Uncle Jim's tips", to bring them all back from the start. A profile from before this version that has finished a run starts with the box off, so a veteran is not taught again. The notes are for solo play only.

A save left standing on the old Act 0 road loads as an ordinary act 1, with its deck, relics and gold.

The Fear Drinker is in your head

In his fight, and no other, a voice comments on what you just did. There is no speech bubble, no caption and no line in the battle log to prove it said anything. It is a whisper set at one ear, so on headphones it sits right beside you.

The first thing he says is "Are you sure about that?", quietly, just after one of your first few cards. After that he picks his moments: a card you hover over the field too long ("Not that one."), the same card put back ("Good. Put it back."), a turn you sit on, a turn ended with a card you could have played, a pause ("I'm still here."), a hit on your crown, one of your units dying, an emote from the wheel (Help! gets "No one can hear you."), the Commander's Heart saving you ("You should be dead."). Each line is said once a fight, and lines you have not heard yet come first. There are 91 of them.

When he is nearly dead he stops taunting and starts asking: "Stop." "Wait." "You need me." When he dies, every line he said that fight comes back at once under his last one and is cut off. If you fall instead, he has a line for that too.

The whispers follow the Effects slider, and rise a little when you turn the music up past its default so the anthem does not drown them. They are in English whatever language the game is set to.

Puptential, and the Exp keyword

Pride Matriarch has left the Wild Pack. In her place is Puptential, a 1-energy puppy with a new keyword, Exp. Every enemy one of its bodies kills puts a point on the card, not on the body, so two Puptentials on the field fill the same bar and the bar carries on into the next fight. At 20 it evolves.

Nothing evolves in the middle of a fight. A full bar turns up in the battle's spoils as Choose Evolution, three faces at the crossroads: Pyret (fire, On Strike: Burn), Puddel (water, On Strike: Charm) or Beagloom (green, Growth). Each of those carries a 40-point bar and three final forms of its own, so a run walks one branch of a nine-leaf tree. Every form costs 1 and fields one body; what changes is the body, its keywords and its rarity. Skip the pick and it comes back after the next fight, because the bar is still full.

Taking the evolution plays the egg's hatching screen with your card in place of the egg. It has a Skip plate, which takes two presses.

The Exp keyword's other card is the Adventurer, in Vanguard: a traveller in a green tunic and a long cap, 1 energy, one body. His bar buys a level instead of an animal. Every 15 kills he gains +1 attack and +1 max HP for good, the bar resets, and he does it again, as many times as the run lasts. The upgraded Puptential evolves at 15 and the upgraded Adventurer levels at 11.

Twin Thrones break through

At Ascension 10 the last act ends on two bosses in a row. The second used to arrive behind a black cover on a freshly built board. Now, when the first one falls, the camera tilts up the back wall to the first lord's backdrop card, a warm light comes through it, and the second lord's shadow stands up behind the paper and takes two heavy steps toward you while the desk dims. Then he breaks through the picture of the board you just won, and his throne is already standing behind the hole.

Your health carries straight through, and a game closed halfway still resumes into the second fight.

The ruin

The three act plates on the title screen show the country a saved run is marching through. A lost run now hands you back to a fourth one: the Verdant Reach after you lost it. The castle hill and the fir wood are burnt down to matchsticks under a black sky, and in the middle of the horizon stands a toppled gatehouse whose arch is the only pure black in the picture.

Both armies walk one road. Yours files out of your own broken gate, over the fallen bridge and into that arch, and does not come out. Theirs comes out of it and away into the burnt wood. Your column is the deck the run you just lost was carrying. It shows once, on the screen the defeat hands you to.

The Mimic, turned over

The Mimic's fight is now seen from the other side of the table: you stand on the right and the Mimic, wearing your own warlord, stands on the left. Names, numbers, dice and speech bubbles turn themselves back so they still read the right way, and the cards print their figures facing the way they now stand.

When its phase break, The Mirror Cracks, goes off, the camera pulls back to the wall. The Mimic's backdrop card glitters, silvers over behind a ragged front and is gone, and a mirror stands in its place with the whole table and the fight in it for the rest of the battle. The glass shows the board the way a mirror would, from behind, so you see the far side of each cardboard sheet.

On the stage

Wally's pieces along the back wall were dyed dark at night. Now every one is drawn a second time for the dark: two windows in three lit, the rest gone out, claw marks down the doors, and the wolf at a window if anything comes up at one. His backdrop card goes to night with the mat as the moon comes up.

The snow that piles up as the Avatar of Winter loses health used to be a soft white blur over his mat. It is cut paper now, and it buries the whole desk. Paper snowflakes flutter down first. Then hills of scalloped white card come down all over the table as small mounds, grow, and run together like the contours on a relief map, until the board is the only thing standing clear.

When Perihelion turns the gravity off, the three sheets of board under the lanes now lift off the table whole and hang apart, each throwing its own shadow on the one below, and come back down in order when he falls.

Every enemy spell used to warn you with the same recipe: a dark die-cut in its colour with hazard stripes round it. Each of the 45 spell families now has a piece of paper made for it, in its own colours, with what the spell is made of cut and laid on top, and a pale centre that swells out as the spell comes down.

Pointing at a body now shows the ground its keywords hold, as well as how far it reaches. A reach is still a ring of dashes. An aura, a taunt, a trap's circle or a death blast is one unbroken pinked line in the colour of what it does: pink for a Siren's song, orange for an Ember Hound's heat, yellow for Ball Lightning. Pack Tactics and Spirit Rites ring the bodies they count instead. When you aim a Charm spell, a paper heart now bobs over every unit it will turn, where the skull shows what it will kill.

The battle plate, in paper

The End Turn plate is a paper label now: a blue mat and a cream face laid on it slightly off square, with the word in cut-paper letters. When the word changes (End Turn, Pause, Resume, Ready) the old letters ball up and the new ones unfold. The autobattle's clock is a ribbon that pleats as it runs down, the sky dial is a window cut in the plate with a paper sun and moon behind hills, the speed row is five chips of card with the lit speed in blue, and the plate hops as your turn opens. Every other bar that fills or drains, from the run header's health to an enemy spell's cast clock and a pack's experience, is a strip of paper that folds the same way.

Winning and losing

The won run's page now shows off the crown the war is fought for: a cardboard crown on a crimson dais with a gold sunburst behind it. Its row of plaques ends in a new one, Total Victories, every campaign this profile has won. The lost run's page has a room of its own too, a dusk set with a card sun going down behind a torn ridge.

The words on paper strips now unfold from scrunched balls like every title and banner: VICTORY and DEFEAT, THE CROWN IS YOURS, a lord's fall word, Rest, Craft and Warm the Egg in the craft room, LEVEL N!, an event's verdict, and the rest. So does the Wishlist now sign on the title screen.

Events

An event's result page used to show the same picture as the page you chose on. Now 267 endings have a picture of their own: a cut-paper figure of how it turned out, standing in the event's room. The Cutpurse sits with his hands up when you catch him, the Hourglass Hermit pours sand out of his sleeve, the Mudflat Derby's horse is hauled out of the puddle, and the Mimic sits back with goblets and coins on its tongue. The event's picture has also lost the red ruled border it had round it.

Seven plain events now leave a mark on your warlord, with no change to what any row costs or pays: a ten-year beard off the Hourglass Hermit, the Peddler's Patch for a little of your face, the Old Standard on your back, hair standing on end after the Galvanist's wagon, the Gilded Corpse's helm, horns after any Devil's Wager, and one of the Pale Court's ghost-lights circling your head.

The Seer's Tripod. Breathe in the fumes and Uncle Jim's head comes up on the stool, then another, then hundreds of them, until the page is buried and you have to find the way out. It pays with a new trophy, The Seer's Stare (eyes the size of saucers whose pupils swell and shrink on their own beats), and with +5 commander attack, so your commander strikes back 5 harder for the rest of the run. It no longer mends.

• The one-armed bandit gives you three pulls a sitting, and every line that lands pays. Its symbols are printed in their own colours, and a winning line punches each symbol up off its reel onto a paper star while the case hops and a heap of whatever the line was made of spills out of a new coin tray.
• The magnet pond's fish have to be landed now: once a fish is on the clip, keep the float's window over it until the line is wound in, or it gets away.
• Guardian Follows. The kind row gives the guardian a relic and gets a different one back. The greedy row takes all your health but 1.
• The merchant's face-down card leans under the pointer like the cards beside it, and once bought you trace its outline before it turns over.
• Uncle Jim's walk-up no longer reads lore. It plays back the best moment of the act you just finished, large under his speech, and he says what it caught and who it was against.
• Five events leave the game: Ferryman's Price, Apothecary's Shelf, Lost Caravan, the Frozen Sentinel and the Mystic Spring.
• The Eclipse Lens says what it does. The heart on the top bar sits under an eclipse while you carry it, an event row that would mend you says "refused" before you pick it, a flask it would refuse is dimmed, and a refused mend says "Eclipsed".

New cards and new drawings

Inferbro joins Pyromancy. He never swings: every attack spins a Fire Tornado up beside his mark, and with nothing in reach he lobs one as far down the lane as he can. A tornado drifts through the line instead of shoving it, catches everyone close to its mark, leaves Burn 1, and burns out in about three seconds.

Primrose Path joins Heartbreakers. For 1 energy it strews a stretch of road with petals, Lovers' Lane, and every enemy standing on it gains Charm 1 a second. It Exhausts, and the upgrade covers a much wider stretch.

The Space Rover replaces the Spaceman's Sentry Gun in his starting deck: an open moon buggy with a blaster bolted to the hood. The card brings two of them for 1 energy, fast cavalry that shoot from range, with 8 HP, 2 attack and the Sentry Gun's rapid rate of fire. Upgraded, it brings four.

The Siren is drawn again from scratch as the thing she is named after: a woman's head and arms on a bird's body, playing a lyre with her eyes shut. The card now summons two Sirens for the same 3 energy, and each note lands Charm 3. Her two evolutions are the same bird-woman now: the Siren Sovereign, crowned, with both wings thrown open and a gilt kithara, and the Dirge Matron, standing in mourning lace with one hand raised to whoever is about to hit her.

The 66 figures and props that play the little gags on a lord's card and mat were still the old dark-outlined icons. They are drawn again in each card's own colours, so the Houndmaster's pack runs his yard in their own coats instead of as a black cut-out.

Packs on a Type 2 warlord

A pack's look used to be drawn once, on a man's face, and every warlord wore that same face under the pack's hat. Nine packs now have a cut of their own for a Type 2 body: a woman knight under Vanguard's helm, a legionary under Steel Legion's with a braid over her shoulder, a noir detective under Draw and Order's fedora, an engineer under the Siege Works sapper helm, a mad scientist under Mutagenesis' goggles, a huntress under the Wild Pack's wolf pelt, a dashing bard under the Heartbreakers' beret, a trapper under Trapper's Delight's fur cap and a countess for Bloodletting. Each keeps the pack's hat or helm in every one of its looks. The draft's flying parts and the pack's commander in the Compendium wear the same cut.

A pack's bare skin now takes the skin of the warlord wearing it as well. The Witch stays green under any hat, both Boxers and the Spacewoman keep their own tones, the Dragon keeps the scales on brow and cheek, the Eternal keeps the night of stars and the Mummy keeps the wraps.

The Compendium's open pack shelf is now headed by the pack's commander, and clicking him changes the look that pack brings to your next draft.

Co-op

At the end of a co-op run the recap now has the party's tally: a row for every warlord, AI ones included, with their most-played card, and a column for damage, kills, biggest hit, units, cards and spells, the winner of each printed on a slip of coloured paper. The victory conga is the whole party, every warlord leading their own army. On the crown screen the dancers stand centred, each in front of a stack of paper sheets, one for every column of the tally they took.

• The Parting Fog pays the warlord who walked alone. Every warlord picks one of four landmarks in secret; the mill removes a card, the hanged oak adds one, the chapel bell transforms one and the standing stones upgrade one, and only a warlord nobody followed is paid. The reveal is staged in fog, with each ally's name tag dropping onto their landmark, and the page has two new pictures, one for walking alone and one for walking into each other.
• A joiner's fight now counts on the joiner's own records: the run tally, the warlord writs, the highlight reel, and achievements like Matryoshka for their own Bonewalker.
• A joiner reads every word the fight floats off a body, in their own language, sees the Mimic's copies of the party's Powers, and feels a drain on their own crown.
• A joiner's commander shows its wounds on their run header, red edge flash and battle log.
• A body made by another body (a merged Amalgam, a death split, a brood, a launcher's payload) fights under its maker's seat.
• A seat that rejoins a fight in progress is caught up on the lord's phases, the Mimic's copies and the round's spell telegraph.
• The right and middle mouse buttons draw on an ally's screen in the party lens, as the left one does.
• Your first co-op game points out the spyglass with a paper slip: "Watch your allies here. You can draw on their screen too."
• Ready flags stand on the field under the commanders' names instead of over the whole HUD.
• Allies see each other's event trophies and commander attack, and an AI warlord keeps a trophy he wins.

Balance

• Gene Therapy gives +2 max HP (+4 upgraded), from +3 (+5).
• Press Gang brings +1 unit (+2 upgraded), from +2 (+3).
• The Pack Grows no longer Exhausts, and its extra bodies leave at the end of the battle.
• Trophy Belt pays on every 2nd enemy that falls.
• Trapdoor costs 0, from 2.
• Flamewave that reaches the end of its lane with a charge left hits the enemy commander for 6 and Burn 1.
• Sirens come two to a card, with Charm 3 on every note.
• Hall of Mirrors copies a body once a fight. A lone World Tree no longer ends up ringed by four copies of itself.
• Two Colossal Oozes standing on each other now combine into The Amalgam.
• Enemy spells that summon units bring them up on the lord's half of the board.
• Each act now holds exactly one fight from the weaker roster, its first.
• No-Quarter Colors says the lifesteal it gives, 20%. It printed 30%.

Small things

• A boss break that changes the arena (the Magnate's kiln, Verdy's meadow, the Mimic's mirror, Winter's fortress) plays its cards after the change instead of over it.
• The battle log writes what the lord's spells did, under each cast.
• No idea stands on two lords' stages: each has its own geese, belfry, airship and the rest.
• The backdrop card is a plain print again; the felt grain stays on the mat and the pieces.
• Burning ground shows its numbers on the bodies it burns.
• The blood moon goes to its place in one move instead of rewinding the night.
• The crane over the Elder Treant's sky flies with the field instead of hanging along the top of the screen.
• A picked card's outline goes all the way round it, in the hand and in the deck picker.
• A trophy's name hangs on a blue ribbon in cut-paper letters.
• What the Eternal conjures in the void is solid as it arrives, and the void's hourglass and Two Cards are solid paper.
• The Compendium's centre crease runs under what lies on the page.
• The Vault and Trinket Fancier count the relics the Compendium lists, and a run's relics all make it into the book.
• An achievement's pop dances the warlord who earned it.
• Settings' Tooltip delay, Sound and Music sliders carry a pencil mark where they ship.
• Uncle Jim's card loses the round token in the corner of its picture.
• On the act 1 title plate, columns crossing the two bridges walk behind the parapet, and the castle's pennants are planted paper.

In the browser

The browser version now says what it is. The first time you reach the title screen in a browser, a letter explains that the download is free and is the better way to play, with co-op, the whole soundtrack, highlight clips and the full lighting and effects, and offers to go fullscreen. After it burns, the menu keeps two gold links: Get the download, and Toggle fullscreen, which now works on the first press.

The pop-up book intro and the Fear Drinker's whispers are in the downloadable game only.

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.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

Every lord's stage, filled in

0.7.18 gave every lord a hand-drawn backdrop card and a blanket for a mat. The pieces standing in front of them were still the old ones: a few dark mounds, stumps and rocks on the kraft wall either side of the card, and toys drawn in an older hand. Now every lord stands pieces of their own place, cut out in the card's own hand and in its colours.

Across all 42 lords that comes to 327 pieces along the back wall, 84 hung in the sky, 168 standing on the mats, and 143 toys drawn again. Pull the camera all the way back and you see the whole wall, flanks and all.

Some short pieces stand at the foot of the card itself, so you see them at the distance a fight is played from, not only when you pull back.

The mat gets pieces too, and every toy was drawn again to match the card.

Most of them do something when you poke them. Perihelion's great reflector swings in its gantry, Haldric's trebuchet swings its arm, the Cursemonger's shears snip, and the Avatar of Winter's snowball rolls off and back. Some have someone living in them: a Specter looks out of the Fear Drinker's windows, a black cat out of the Lost Witch's doors, and a small Gravitite out of Perihelion's observatory.

0.7.20 finished the last three walls, for the Twins, Simple Ton and Mum, the Word, and made sure a lord's piece never stands twice on one wall. Pulled all the way back, 33 of the 42 walls had been showing one of their pieces twice, Blastcap two live kegs among them.

Felt

The stage is felt construction paper now. The mat, the backdrop card, the toys, the wall pieces, the clouds and the pieces in the sky each carry a felt fibre in their own paper, so it moves with them when the camera pans and zooms or a toy hops. The units, the commanders, the cardboard lanes, the tape and the cutting mat carry none. Whatever a felt piece throws is felt too, so Blastcap's keg goes up in felt staves and hoops.

The mat also lost the crease that ran across its middle, and it rolls out at the start of a fight now. It comes down as a tube of its own paper, unrolls toward you with a ripple running back through it, and its corners are taped down after.

Headings cut from paper

Screen titles, the big headings and the words on every hanging banner are cut-paper letters now. Each word arrives as a row of scrunched-up paper balls that unfold into letters, a little off the line and each a little bigger or smaller than the next, as if cut out with scissors.

Bosses

The Brass Colossus. Once the Foundry Titan is down from his refit, his whole arena stands up into the machine he is. The blueprint mat turns over into brass plate, the back wall closes into his face, clawed arms rise along both sides of the board and cogs turn at the corners. It keeps moving for the rest of the fight.

Perihelion. Its Syzygy switches gravity off. A pulse of warped air leaves it, the lane stack comes apart into its roads and drifts, and every body floats, along with the toys on the mat and the wall. Its death brings it all back down, one piece at a time, with a puff where each lands.

The Magma Magnate. When his kiln burns the back wall, the fire runs on down across the mat, and under it is his pit: a cut-paper shaft of ledges going down through the desk to a lake of melt everywhere the lanes are not, with crust on the melt, fires along the burnt lip, his imps watching from the ledges, and the board lit from underneath.

Rex Mortifer. When he cuts the lanes out of the mat, the islands left between them go up as pieces of the table, with the mat's thickness and the desk's wood showing at the edge, and the pieces standing on the mat go up with them.

The Pale Rider no longer vanishes in a see-through mist when he moves to a new cairn. His piece rears in a bank of paper dust, gallops round the back of the cairns with his name and health sliding along under him, and leaves a pair of horseshoes on the board. His last break stands him at every cairn at once: three riders say "Which", "one", "am I?", and the first two that take a real blow burst as illusions.

Finishing moves

Four finishing moves were redone in paper.

• The summer sun that ends the Avatar of Winter is three pieces of card on a brass pin, two sheets of rays turning against each other, and the spring after it is folded paper: a crocus, a snowdrop and two fern crosiers.
• Blastcap's keg goes off the way his bombs do: stacked stars, flame tongues, a dust skirt, cut smoke and confetti.
• The Magma Magnate dies in three breaths: one for the candles on his crown, a gale that blows his fireball back over his shoulder, and a single finger that tips the cold statue backwards into his own pit.
• Grix's three stolen crowns stack on top of the one on his head, four high.

The fight, in paper

Fireball is cut from card: a paper comet thrown from the caster, a sunburst of flat flame, and a pop-up bonfire of stacked red, orange, yellow and cream sheets that flickers and folds away.

A thrown potion breaks on the field as cut paper and floats its name up out of the splash. Blood, ooze and hit flecks are cut paper too.

Seismic Steps breaks the board out to a spear's length: a giant's footfall drops a cracked plate of ground as wide as what it shook, with slabs heaved up and clods thrown to the rim. It used to draw five hairlines hidden under the giant's own stand.

A card made better in your hand is shown being made better. Gene Therapy, The Pack Grows, Exspiravit and the Blue Jay lift the card out of the fan, stick new copies of the changed pieces of its face onto it, throw paper streamers from behind it and drop it back in its slot.

• Any unit that gets stronger now stands up the upgrade column: Growth, On Kill and Devour, Soul Harvest, When Struck, a battlecry's gift, Channeling, Pack Tactics, and the powers, relics, potions and spells that raise attack, armor or max HP.
• Auras pour instead of pulsing. Burn and Charm climb a little every tenth of a second, and Stun, Fear and Madness fill a meter on the body and land when it is full, so overlapping fields get there sooner. The first hold lands half an interval after a body walks in.
• Pointing at a lane front shows how many more units it will stop, and the count comes down as it goes through the line.

Events and screens

The Blood God's Wheel is a new event. Bleed 5 HP to spin a wheel with one wedge for every relic you carry, and take a copy of the one it stops on. Or bleed 5 more, and that relic comes off the wheel while its neighbours swell to fill the gap, and it goes round again.

The Seer's Tripod is another. Breathe in the fumes, and the page it lands on is buried under Uncle Jim's head, several hundred times over, parting only round the pointer.

The Path of Evolution is chosen at a fork in the road now, on a pop-up scene of its own instead of a black screen.

The Daily March briefing takes the whole screen, on its own road, and unfolds like the road map it is.

• The Alchemist's Vat dissolves the card you feed it. The brew eats the old face away in pits from the foot up, and the card it became is underneath.
• The Demon of Worst Choices comes closer while the page waits, until his whole head fills the space under the run header.
• The Tomb of the Thirteenth hangs the number the door asks for over the basin, chiselled in bone and granite on black slate.
• Uncle Jim's raincloud rains. Paper drops fall and splash on his head and shirt, and every few seconds the cloud wrings itself out.

Your warlord

The King's sign is his royal standard: crimson hung from a gilt rod with a tassel off each end, his name in gold leaf between two copies of the crown his doll wears, and his title inked on an ermine hem. As the Queen it carries her three-bladed circlet.

• Giantkind's head is a huge baby's head now, with big eyes, rosy cheeks, one tooth and one curl of hair. A warlord wearing Giantkind's parts stands physically bigger, and his health bar, taunts and stand measure him as he stands.
• When you win a fight, your warlord leads a conga line of your deck's units across the victory page, one piece for each summon card, three steps and a kick.

Reading the fight

• Slimify is a keyword now. A slimed unit's card says it splits into half-health copies of itself when it dies, a second cast adds to the count, and the slimed body is re-inked in the Slime's greens with bubbles, a wobble and drips.
• Defector is a keyword. It gilds wherever a card names it, and its panel says it is a fully Charmed enemy that changed sides.
• The battle log writes who struck whom, what each card did and what hurt each commander.
• On a controller, aiming a spell opens where the game would cast it for you: an area spell on the group worth hitting, a single-target spell on its target, a lane spell on its lane. The d-pad nudges the aim the way you press it.

Balance

• Errant Whispers summons five Whispers at 7 HP and 3 attack, up from three at 5 HP and 2 attack.
• The Prizefighter gets Pounce 3 and 8 health instead of 5, and its upgrade takes it to Pounce 6.
• The Charmweaver's strikes land Charm 1, on top of her Charm Aura.
• Flashpowder scatters 4 traps that deal 3 damage as well as Blind, and its upgrade scatters 6.
• Pit Trap Diagrams lays two Bear Traps at random spots each round instead of dealing 4 damage to a random enemy.
• The Boiler's upgrade buys +5 attack and +7 HP per energy spent, up from +4 and +6.
• The Rapt-Boar carries 6 HP again.
• Exit Fee sends an Alley Hawker instead of the Alley Cavalier, and it surfaces at midfield, so there is a long walk to catch it.
• Brother Clang has 34 HP, up from 26, so the fight lasts long enough for the Great Toll to ring.
• Mini Me is half your commander's max HP and attack, and anything the card has banked is added on top of that half instead of being overwritten.
• The Mudflat Derby's odds add up to 100%: the favourite runs at 50 and the stayer at 35 beside Old Thunder's 15.
• The Tome of Threefold Paths pays its curse in cards that are all Rare or better.
• Echo Vial copies the whole card, so a Congregation's echo musters its Thrall again and Fan Club its defectors, where it used to pour only the printed squad.
• Chain of Sorrows no longer answers its own kills.
• 0.7.21: Overwatch no longer shells the enemy commander. Dropped on a lord's feet, one 1-energy card turned every ranged unit you had on him for ten seconds. The mark now fires only on the army standing in it.

Co-op

• A joiner sees everything the host's units have that their printed cards do not say: a one-off Undying or Overheal, the Growth and Thorns flasks, a Power folded into a standing army, the Mimic's mirror and Pack Tactics armor all show on a joiner's hover and on the body.
• The Pale Rider's mirror images stand and burst the same way on every seat.
• A joiner's lane-front count reads the same number as the host's and stops on the same body.

Fixes

• A game closed between a hand-over and the button that leaves it no longer pays twice. Uncle Jim's check-in relic, the treasure room's relic and the craft room's rest, craft or hatch each go into the save the moment they are given, and the reopened screen shows only its way out.
• A run closed on the last boss's defeat resumes onto its verdict page instead of a map with no road left on it.
• The Witch's Cauldron's Cleansing Tears stacks its Regen when it pours twice.
• Double Down settles as its wheel stops, on screen, and a Jackpot burns the card there.
• The upgrade peek you open with a right click keeps its card on the page instead of hanging half off the screen.
• 0.7.21: the pencil line round the mat's torn edge comes down with the mat instead of turning up ahead of it.

In the browser

0.7.20's browser build came out too big for itch, so the web version sat on 0.7.17 while every other build moved on. 0.7.21 fits again, and the browser build caught up with everything above.

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.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

Forty-two lords, forty-two stages

A lord's stage is three pieces of paper. The backdrop card stands along the back wall of the box, the mat lies under the board, and the same place is printed behind every card on that lord's roster. In 0.7.17 most backdrops were a horizon with a few props on it. Each one is now a place at a time of day.

Wally's village has its church, his thatched cottage with the cardigan on the line, the green, the Moon and Hound and the butcher's, over his mustard cable-knit throw. Rex Mortifer's Necropolis stands at the Long Night over a celadon pall. The Fire Devil's Ember Kingdom is at hell's twilight over a flame-stitch hearth rug.

The Houndmaster's kennel yard is in red canyon country at sundown, over a houndstooth hunting blanket. The Grave Tide stands on the Wreckshore on a sea-fret morning, over his drowned ship's mainsail. Verdy B. Queen's Hive Garden is a spring morning over a hexagon flower-garden quilt.

The Pale Rider rides into his cow town on the Boneflats at the black noon, over the pale horse's saddle blanket. Perihelion stands over its crater at the dawn after the fall, with the observatory and its refractor on the planets in line, over an astronomer's star-chart throw. The Slime Lord's castle sits on its moat on the jubilee night with the fireworks going up, over a royal purple banqueting cloth.

The Lost Witch has her heath at the blue hour, with a storm coming over, a star falling and her rook tower under its hat of a roof. Amanita holds court in her Sporewood by moonlight. The Mimic's salt flat is flooded into a mirror at a silver dawn, and everything standing on it is given back upside down.

Here are the backdrop cards up close.

And here is every one, with Wally's village by night and the Elder Treant's wood in autumn, which his fight turns over to partway through.

A mat is the ground the board lies on, so it stays quiet. Every mat keeps one or two close tones wherever the board can lie, in any layout and in co-op, and the pattern and the objects live out in the border. The Fire Devil's field is one scarlet with the flame stitch a faint grain in it, and the full bargello runs in a band inside the binding with a scorch hole burned through it. The Houndmaster's is one tweed brown with the houndstooth in a band. The Broodmother's silk throw is two blues a breath apart, with a web across each corner block. Rex Mortifer's pall is one celadon in faint lozenges, with the gold lilies moved out into a hem.

The same places stand behind every card on a lord's roster, on the bestiary page and when you hover a lord on the field.

Grix and Sift went first. Grix's card is an afternoon town built on top of itself: a stilt lookout, a washing stack, a mushroom house, his keep, a rope bridge, a privy, a patchwork balloon over the market and the alarm gong, over a quilt of stolen patches. Sift's is the Throne Heap with his gilded chair, the lived-in Great Teapot and the boot house, over a mosaic of lilac tiles. A fight against both of them tapes two different mats together. Each stands six toys you can poke: Grix has a stewpot that boils over, a bouncing toadstool house and a banner that winks, and Sift has a teapot that pours out ratlings, a boot with a family living in it and a crate of bottles that plays a chord.

Two lords' mats were redone again before the build went out. Bill the Bull-Blooded's is a great bull's hide spread on cream felt, with his hoof brand on its hip and a branding iron left beside it, and Blastcap's turquoise blasting tarp has his explosions painted in the corners.

Phase breaks in paper sets

When a boss hits a phase, the fight stops for its banner. Those banners used to play over shapes drawn in light: hairline boughs, triangle fans and the same ring of flaps at every boss's feet. Each boss now has a paper set that folds up behind it, and something in the set happens on the slam. The title is cut from card as well, die-cut letters with a board edge and a lit rim on torn strips, and they land hard enough to kick up their chad.

In the pictures below the first second of each break is slowed to half speed, because at full speed the set is up and the slam is over before you can see either.

The Elder Treant, The Forest Answers. Two rows of cut-paper trees fold up from his feet outward, a roof of leaves drops in with vines off it, and on the slam the roots tear up either side of him.

Wally, The Blood Moon. Both his breaks play in his village by night. On the first the clouds part on a moon rising behind him and every window goes out. On the second the moon turns over on its string and lands red.

Verdy B. Queen, The Great Bloom. A comb hung off the top strip builds cell by cell behind her over a garden in bud, and every bud bursts open on the slam.

The Magma Magnate, The Kiln Opens. His last stand is in front of the bottle kiln. Its iron doors swing open on the fire and its mortar goes hot.

The Avatar of Winter, Whiteout. Ice peaks fold up with snow on every ridge, paper snowflakes turn on their threads, and the slam tears a blizzard of white strips across the frame.

The Grave Tide, The Tide Comes In. Four rows of paper sea with curled cream crests, the lighthouse on the point and his drowned ship's mast in rags, and on the slam a breaker heaves up behind him and curls over.

The Lost Witch, The Whole Book. A bank of storm cloud drops in, cut rain slants down and a grimoire taller than she is stands open behind her, turning its own pages. On the slam, chain lightning cracks down.

The Mimic, The Mirror Cracks. It stands its stolen body, your own warlord silvered over, in front of a great gilt cheval glass, and the glass cracks from one blow.

Wynken, The Dream Turns. A crib mobile hangs over his bed and his dream is laid out as patchwork hills. On the slam the mobile spins, and every piece on it turns over to its nightmare side.

Blastcap, The Powder Goes Up. A fuse burns in along the foot through the wind-up, and on the slam his keg pile goes up in a great layered blast with the kegs flying end over end.

Here are four more. Cadric's court feasts under a dead tree with a crow on every branch end, and on the slam the whole tree's worth of crows goes up into a wheel over his head. Amanita's wood folds up round a fairy ring, and every cap in it puffs its spores. The Cursemonger's giant ledger tears its pages out and throws them at you. The Fear Drinker convenes the Gallows Court under a sick-yellow moon, a great gavel comes down, and every moth on the moon bursts off it.

Simple Ton gets mad on his Trollmoor: the peat tears open from his feet to both edges, every boulder jumps, the crows go up and the standing stone opens its eyes. The Houndmaster's chains snap off their stakes and the hunt runs past in silhouette. The Bloodhorn Warband's mob rises out of the foot of the frame in three ranks with spears, axes and torches. Silvertongue's striped awnings pour coin into drifts along the foot, and his gong swings.

The Pale Rider's road starts running under him with the milestones going past. Perihelion's three worlds wheel in along one arc and snap into line behind it on the slam. The Brass Colossus's yard blows steam out of its mains. The Iron Wardens close ranks in front of their walls.

The Brass Colossus builds his last form

His last break, The Foundry Stands Up, opens with a jump scare. The titan's clawed hand leaves the Colossus's chest and comes at you, its talons hit the glass and star it out, the fingers clench and drag gouges toward the palm, lightning crawls between the talons, and it cuts back to the battle in one frame. With Reduce Motion on, every beat still plays but the shake, and the flashes are toned down.

The Foundry Titan's parts stand about his yard for the whole fight, and you can poke each one: the legs stamp, the hull's firebox draws, the fist knocks, the claw flexes and sparks, and the head's eyes come on. When the break comes, an electromagnet comes down out of the dark and lifts him, a gripper arm and a little welder pop up out of the board, and piece by piece the gripper pulls the old part off and throws it into the forge on the back wall, catches the new one as it leaps off its place in the yard, and seats it while the welder runs a bead along the seam. His mat is now the titan's blueprint, pinned to the desk.

The Elder Treant's autumn

Once Heartwood Unbound is dismissed, the camera pulls back over the whole stage, his heart throbs gold twice, and the season breaks out of him as a gold front with a storm of paper leaves behind it. It turns his brood, the wall's cut-outs and the room's light as it goes, and the trees that grow and die on his mat come up in autumn from then on.

Then a great tree grows up out of the desk under his board. It takes the lanes and the backdrop card in its limbs and carries them up out of the box, through a deck of cloud, into a golden sky over a sea of cloud. The fight goes on up there, with the board swaying in the wind and a crane or a skein of geese going by now and then. With Reduce Motion on, the box crossfades to the grown tree instead.

Health bars fold

A health bar is a strip of paper now. A wound pleats it back and forth up its own length until its end stands on the right mark, crushed nearly flat at the last sliver. Shield used to be a second bar. It now runs on from the green as blue paper on the same track, and it folds the same way.

The War Council

Co-op used to blink in. The War Council is now walked into through a tent door: two striped canvas flaps draw shut over the screen you are leaving, a blue rosette pins them, then it pops and the flaps are swept back and tied off like a pavilion's door while the council lays itself out on the table. Leaving for the title strikes the tent.

Each seat is a file card taped down over a sheet of its warlord's banner colour, and every change at a seat plays its own scene. Somebody who sits down is dropped onto the base, bounces and waves. An AI is set down spinning like a wound-up toy and gives its battle cry. A removed AI is plucked up spinning and gone over the top of the card, a kicked player is flicked off the table, a closed seat gets two strips of tape slapped across it, and Ready comes down as a stamp.

The Craft Room

The campfire is a craft room now: a cardboard workshop on the desk, with thread shelves and a cutting mat down one side and an armchair nook down the other. The units in the deck you carry walk about the back of it, in at one doorway and off through another. Its map marker is a spool of thread and a pair of scissors.

Upgrading a card is a craft too. Glue goes down on every piece the upgrade reprints, with a line of it on the name strip, the new pieces are stuck on over the glue, and paper streamers burst from behind the card as it settles into its upgraded face. It replaces the anvil strike and the gold plus seal.

The merchant's mystery card

The merchant sells one card face-down. It is black with only its icon's outline showing, it costs 10% less with a red -10% sign on its tag, and buying it plays the unlock reveal right there on the shelf.

Three new events

Magnet Pond. A miller's family has turned their wash-tub into a pond. The fish are card, each with an iron clip through its nose and a number inked on its side. Steer the magnet, dip it, and whatever clip is under it comes up and swings into the pail. Six points pays out of the jam jar, ten wins their grandmother's tonic, and fourteen means the family agrees you have fished the pond out. (0.7.22 made a catch a little harder: a fish now has to be landed.)

The Game of Games. Where four roads meet, a games-master in a patchwork coat has laid out every game in the land on one trestle. The second page is the games themselves: all 22 minigames as leaning cut-paper tiles, and you pick the one you want to play.

The Parting Fog is for co-op. The fog comes down off the moor and the party loses each other. Every warlord picks one of four landmarks in secret (the old mill, the hanged oak, the chapel bell or the standing stones), and you cannot watch your allies' screens while you pick. In 0.7.18, finding an ally at your landmark was the prize, and the whole party agreeing paid most. That has since been turned round, and the 0.7.22 notes have the details.

In every co-op event, each seat now rolls its own luck: wheels, coin flips, races, pachinko, random relics and random cards come out differently per seat, so the party has something to compare.

The title screen

With a run to continue, the main menu stands on the act you are in: the Verdant Reach, the Ember Wastes or Frostspire, each a cardboard set with one road for both armies. Your column marches one way and theirs the other. In the Verdant Reach the windmill turns, swallows cross the sky and now and then a fish jumps out of the river. In the Ember Wastes the volcano spits lava bombs and two pairs of vultures circle. In Frostspire paper snow falls at three depths under a tissue-paper aurora. Continue dives into the set.

A won run comes home to a painted title. The cardboard letters are washed in a running rainbow watercolour, and the armies on both flanks send paper rockets up that break into cut-card confetti. With Reduce Motion on you get the painted title without the fireworks.

The Discord is on the title screen too, as a cardboard cutout above the studio mark, with a door to it in Settings, on the demo's last screen, in the War Council and on the thank-you note after you send feedback.

Smaller pieces of paper

The commander you finish a draft with stands in front of pleated paper fans instead of a gold oval. A gold fan and a crimson one unfurl behind him and stand half open, breathing. Point at him and both sweep wide with a throw of paper chips, and March on opens them one last time and snaps them shut.

A locked pack card is strapped shut. A strap of crimson stock wraps round the foot of its picture with a brass padlock snapped on it and its level lettered beside it, where it used to wear a black "LOCKED - LV 3" bar.

Aim and range rings are cut from card. What a play will strike is a scalloped two-ply hoop over tinted tissue, and how far something reaches is a ring of card dashes. Both foreshorten with the board the way the base discs do.

• A pack on the picker is a deck: four more cards lie squared up under its face, and picking it gathers them into one before the crest swallows it.
• A charmed unit that changes sides stands up the upgrade column in Charm pink, with paper hearts rising through it and a big heart over its head that turns over from its old side's colours to its new side's.

Fights

• A curse you end your turn holding is played for you. It comes up out of the hand, throws its line at your commander, the wound lands, and it burns. Mirror's Due, War Tax and Searing Brand used to catch fire in the hand while a number came off your commander with nothing joining the two.
• A curse played at you says who did it and where it went: "The Cursemonger cast Curse the Deck", "Shuffled into your draw pile".
• Lane waves pick their roads at the top of the turn and mark them, so Fire Front, Caustic Tide, Whiteout, Stampede and the all-lane tides show which lanes they will roll down before they go off.
• A sacrificed unit is torn in two over a blood circle instead of toppling like any other death.
• A unit's reach ring on hover, and a summon's while you place it, are cut to the lanes: it shows on its own road and on any road next to it that it reaches, never on the ground between.
• While you pick the card Fireball burns, hovering another card lifts it to reading size over the pick, so every option can be read.
• A status that lands floats its name alone: Burn, never "Burn 1/s".
• A commander's status tokens hang beside its health bar, over the bodies.
• When one of the Twins falls, the survivor's banner reads "Brother!!!!" or "Sister!!!!".
• In a fight against two lords, each one stands in its own yard again.
• An upgraded keyword value prints in bold.
• A Launcher's card prints the unit it launches on its ranged arrow instead of a 0.

Balance

• Soulfire costs 1 energy (was 2).
• The Fire Giant lobs its fire from further back: range 85 to 130, still shorter than an Archer's 150.
• Giant's Brew is a Power now. Every unit that arrives on your side tosses a coin: a lucky toss grows it +50% attack, max HP and size, and a miss brings it in with Madness 5s.
• Mystery Egg: Titan Seeds come out three at a time, Rootguards three and Thorn Spitters four, so every roll but the lone Spiderling beats a 1-energy card. A Wildcard Egg always hatches more than 1 energy's worth of what it rolls.
• The upgraded Dragon Egg costs 1, and a Dragon Egg can now hatch a clutch of five small Dragon Whelps. A coloured Dragon's card shows its colour.
• The Cursemonger fields Curselings, a 1-cost card of eight stitched sackcloth dolls, and his Ledger Comes Due shuffles three Dead Weights into your deck instead of one.
• Grave Pact repeats every On Death, and its extra Tombstone stands beside the first instead of on top of it.
• The Stolen Name's Hollows walk onto the road you summoned on.

Co-op

• The party walks to the node it voted for on every seat's map.
• When you resume a council, the host can kick a saved warlord out of the march and sit a new AI in any open chair.
• Watching an ally's screen sends only what changed, at up to 1920 pixels wide.
• Joiners see and hear what the host's fight does: summons leaping out of the portal, eggs and fresh graves cracking open, every swing's clang, every hit's sparks and a boss's phase flashes.
• A lord's field shape keeps its character with more seats: the siege road keeps its switchbacks and the highway shares one centre road.
• Ready flags stand on top of the battle log instead of lifting it off the End Turn plate.

Small things

• The Train Conductor's, the Explorer's and the Dragon's opening cards wear their warlord's head on the starter stone instead of an S.
• Wally's face is redrawn as a three-quarter head with both amber eyes and heavy brows. Brother Clang is a jolly old friar with a grey tonsure, Hew's hood stays on her head, the Lost Witch's hair falls over her shawl collar, and the Pirate's eyepatch lies flat on the face.
• The Records page shows every achievement with its Steam icon, in colour once you have earned it.
• A plain event page you have already read steps back behind one you have never met, as long as one is in reach.
• No event can deal a table with every row shut.
• Muting the game while it is not focused is on by default.
• The Tomb of the Thirteenth asks you to throw 3 dice for a total of exactly 13.
• A pack's level-up in the victory recap is one plate: the crest once, the cards it freed, and the Path it opened.
• A relic's pickup plays wherever the relic came from: the Heavy Stash, the Eternal's void, a chest or a resumed save.

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.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

Every warlord, drawn again

The old doll was five flat pictures: a head, a torso, arms, legs and an accessory, and each one tipped and swung as a single piece. The new doll is a paper puppet on brads. It has shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips and knees, a face that changes expression, and six hand poses, so a fist closes round a sword hilt and a finger can point.

Every warlord was drawn twice, once for each body type.

Every emote, all three dances and the fall when you lose were animated again for the joints. Here is the King on the old doll and the new one.

Each warlord has a little life of their own while standing around. The Gunslinger's spurs spin, the tip of the Witch's hat sways, the Ninja's headband tails flutter, the Viking's braids swing, the lights on the Spaceman's chest blink, and the Dragon's tail sways while a wing twitches now and then.

Marching through the page

Sound the March used to fade to the pack draft. Now your warlord throws a fist up, hops off the stand and lands at the spot and size they have on the draft, while the draft page folds up from the bottom of the screen with a hole cut in their exact shape. The hole is cut for the pose they land in, so the page fits round them as it lands.

Back does the opposite. The page falls forward off your warlord and they hop home to the stand.

Every pack, in three looks

Each pack you draft dresses one part of your warlord: the head, the torso, the arms, the legs or an accessory. So each pack was drawn as five pieces, and every piece has to hold up alone on anybody.

Every pack has three looks. Battleworn is the everyday one. Winning a run with a pack unlocks its Gilded look, and raising the pack to its final level forges its Ascendant form. Gilded is the same character in their best: finer cloth, a taller plume, a jewelled clasp, with the gold kept to the trim. The Slime Swarm's gilded jelly has a small gold crown swallowed inside its head, and coins sunk at different depths in its body.

Here are seven of the everyday looks next to what they replaced.

Ascendant forms

The old Ascendant look was a recoloured body with a halo, a drift of particles and a ring on the ground. All three are gone. Each Ascendant form is now drawn piece by piece in the pack's own element, and each has one effect, cut from paper like the rest of the doll.

Pyromancy, The Living Flame. Scorched ground with molten cracks, a ring of flames, embers spiralling up, and a phoenix on the staff.

Steel Legion, The Stormforged. Paper bolts strike the ground on one side of him, then the other.

Wild Pack, The Alpha Moon. A great spirit wolf stands behind you with stars in its coat.

Siege Works, The War Engine. You stand on the sled of your own machine while a copper gear turns at your back and the stack puffs smoke rings.

Slime Swarm, The First Ooze. Six little slimes with faces hop round your feet, and bubbles rise through your body.

Forbidden Lore, The Last Reader. The ground splits open on ink and tentacles rise at your sides, the two tallest ending in an eye that watches you.

Heartbreakers, The Heartless. A rain of love letters he never opens, landing on a heap at his feet.

Pandemonium, The Crowned Riot. He juggles a die, a bell, a crown, a battle card and a bauble.

And the rest:

• Goblin Horde, The Hoard King stands ankle deep in a heap of coin, with a goblet, a sword and gems in it.
• Giantkind, The Walking Mountain has a mountain coming up under him: broken ground, a lit crack, and two snow-capped crags with a cloud on each peak.
• Bloodletting, The Crimson Tide stands in a sea of blood made of wave-cut card.
• Vanguard, The First Banner has the sun behind his shoulders.
• Mutagenesis, The Apex Strain stands in a spilled pool of the strain, with a double helix climbing out of it on each side.
• Primordial Growth, The World-Tree stands in a grove whose buds open in turn.

• Spectral Host, The King in Mist stands over a bank of mist that lost souls rise out of.
• Bug Hive, The Endless Swarm has a wall of honeycomb behind him, with drones flying cell to cell.
• Final Rites, The Last Litany stands in a circle of script and six grave candles.
• Draw and Order, The Infinite Hand has a dial of twelve battle cards behind him, and each card turns to show its picture as the long hand reaches it.
• Behind You!, The Unseen Blade has two shadow doubles at his shoulders, and his own shadow lifts a dagger.
• The Wasting, The Pale Rot grows a fairy ring of mushrooms where he stands.
• Trapper's Delight, The Perfect Snare stands among four open traps that snap shut one after another.

The effects answer your emotes. Rage and the wolf snarls with its hackles up, the tide of blood rises to your knees and the ring of fire leaps. Mope and the wolf hangs its head, the tide sinks to a puddle and the fire gutters.

You show one effect at a time. If you wear Ascendant pieces from more than one pack, the look decides which effect you get, and Shuffle look at the end of the draft shuffles the effect along with the pieces.

The effect stands with you on the battlefield.

Trophies

The trophies you win from events were drawn again for the new doll: Duelist's Shades, The Ten-Gallon Crown, The Magnificent Mustache, The Powdered Wig and the rest. The Peg Leg has nothing to replace on a body with no shin, like a ghost's tail of mist, so there it turns into a ghost parrot on your shoulder.

The new doll dances at the Coronation, and Uncle Jim still runs on to join in.

When a lord falls

An act lord now falls under a word of his own. The Elder Treant is FELLED, Wally is COLLARED and the Magma Magnate is QUENCHED. The page shows the lord in full colour under his own sign, and a boss win no longer says the lord of this place is dead.

VICTORY itself lands as a prize ribbon on a paper sunburst, a cream strip with a red rosette pinned to it.

Curses are played at you

A curse forced on you in battle is played at you first now. It rises out of whatever caused it, the hex's own card, a dying Hex Wisp or the Jinx that reached your lord, to full reading size. It holds as long as an enemy card does, with a thread tying it to its source, then dives into the pile or hand slot it went to.

Threats you can hear and see

A crown volley's shots now leave the lord and land on your commander with a sound, in that lord's own ammunition. A phase break's banner, its stomp and each thing it does to you have sounds of their own.

The ground a guard volley will hit is one piece of paper down every road now, where it used to be a runner per road stacked up where they met. It lies on the board all turn, so you can see where to stand.

The Explorer's trails

The Explorer's trails wander like an old adventurer's route, curving round every marker they pass. In co-op with a road-bound ally, No Roads frees only her seat. When her pick wins the vote the whole party walks her trail in single file, and that rank's roads crumble off the chart. On every chart, the roads you didn't take fade back once you've left their rank behind.

Cards and events

Blue Jay is reworked. It costs 1 and Exhausts, and a card in your hand permanently gains "When Drawn: draw a card". The stamp lasts the whole run and prints on the card's face. Two Jays on one card make it draw 2.

Motley Jack's Wall pays the Medium Brass Ring only for a solved clasp. Miss it and the ring stays on his cord, but the letter comes anyway. Carry that letter to the altar with no ring and he reads it at last, and weeps.

The Ghost, Tombstone, Banshee and Raven Familiar cards print their own card art now, where they used to blow up the small field print.

Units

• The Bio-Titan was drawn again as one creature: a hump rolled over a belly, a small scowling head sunk in front, one huge near arm and one small far arm.
• The Prime Specimen and the Test Subject lead with the near shoulder.
• The Stone Giant's slab is one piece of sandstone, so it reads as quarried rock and not a kite shield.
• The War Giant holds the helm he took by its spike, where you can see it.
• The Dice Titan has a hinged bone jaw where it had a visor.
• Were-Wally has a wolf's fangs, and you can see through his open mouth in profile.
• The Hive Guard's jaws are brown like the bees', and the Shuriken Adept points with a real hand.

Your small goblins are drawn taller now, and the Goblin Brute and the Warboss stand a head taller than the rest, so the big lads read as big again. Each one still packs, reaches and gets hit at its own size.

Fights

• Every fight is drawn between the simulation's ticks, on every platform. Bodies glide on every rendered frame, and so do the seven lane fronts: the tide, the fire wall, the knife volley, the crown's salvo, the fire mission, the fuse and the reaching root.
• A melee unit stuck behind a line of its own archers walks round the end of the line, or shoulders through when the line fills the road. It used to step back and forth behind them.
• Ending your turn while the deploy frame is still gliding in holds the round on the frame you planned in.
• In a fight against two lords, when one falls the camera goes to the one left standing for their line, then opens out onto the frame the turn is played in. It used to pull back to wherever it stood when the blow landed.
• When the last lord falls, your hand, the pause plate, the battle log and the rest of the HUD fade out and stay out through the finisher and the VICTORY ribbon. They used to come back under the letterbox bars.
• The spell that ends a fight no longer plays over the finishing move. A Fireball's flames fade out, and nothing new is drawn while the camera is on the lord.

When the last lord falls, the table clears for the finisher.

Co-op

• Perihelion's Gravity Toss plays on every seat. Joiners hear and see the heave and each crash on a crown, and every hurled body flies on their screen.
• Joiners see and hear the crown volley and the phase stomp, with every shot landing on the host's outcome.

Phones and the browser

• The Compendium opens on a page that is already set under its cover, and closing it no longer freezes the screen it hands back.
• A field stops compositing pictures nobody sees, and stands are drawn in fewer, bigger batches. A crowded frame went from 2,544 draws to 2,122.
• Phones and the browser run the simulation at 30 ticks a second. With the drawing between ticks, bodies glide there too.

Small things

• Backing out of the pack draft keeps the song playing where it was.
• The battle log fades with the rest of the HUD when the hand tucks away, and its tab no longer carries an unread count.
• Wally's set pieces pull the camera back to take in the sky when it isn't already showing.
• Lord portraits on the map, the crest stamp and the Compendium are taken without their drifting motes, so the stray specks round them are gone.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 2 October 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

Every lord, drawn again

0.7.13 redrew the warlords and 0.7.14 redrew the units. This time it was the lords across the table. Every enemy commander was drawn again in flat paper, piece by piece on the rig he moves with, and his map token, crest and Compendium portrait were baked again from the new drawing.

Some changed a lot. Simple Ton is a mossy troll with a bird's nest on his head. Sift is a real rat king, knotted at the tails. The Grave Tide is a wave of the drowned with a giant inside it, the Avatar of Winter is an antlered frost spirit, Perihelion is a meteor with a face, and the Fear Drinker is a death's-head hawkmoth. Blastcap wears a powder keg for a breastplate. The Lord of Misrule is a portly old reveller king with the wheel of fate planted as his staff. Verdy B. Queen got a lot cuter, and Rex Mortifer's skull has a hinged jaw now.

Warlord Ash is a black Labrador: an old lab gone grey at the muzzle, up on his hind legs as the raider king, still carrying his crown, torch and loot sack.

Enemy units and lords also face left now on their cards, on the map and in the Compendium, the same way they stand on the field.

New finishers

Every lord's finisher was redone for the new drawings, and most of them are new gags.

• Ossric, the Marrow-Mormaer loses at Jenga. You pull a rib, a femur and then his backbone, and the tower wobbles on each pull.
• Vetch, the Bog-Vizier gets caught in a butterfly net.
• Wynken is tucked in with a pat on his own quilt, the lights go out on the bed, and the last sheep jumps off into the dark.
• Verdy B. Queen is smoked to sleep. She nods, jerks awake, nods off again and goes under three Zs.
• The Magma Magnate's crown lights up like birthday candles and gets blown out.
• The Grave Tide drains down a plughole.
• The Brass Colossus is stoked until his head blows off.
• Bill the Bull-Blooded is fought as a bull, with a muleta.
• Cadric is fooled by a warlord playing dead.
• The Mimic plays the mirror game and copies a fall it can't catch.
• The Houndmaster's three heads knock together over one bone.
• Silvertongue is charmed into a basket, and the Lost Witch melts into a puddle under her hat.

Bosses that change shape

When a boss woke into its second form, the old cinematic raised the new body up through the breaking old one, so for a moment there were two lords in the frame. Now each boss has a change of its own and never shows both bodies at once:

• The Elder Treant sinks into its roots, and the woken one tears up out of the ground.
• A line of fire climbs the Magma Magnate from his feet to his crown.
• Rex Mortifer collapses into a heap of bones that climb back up as the new one.
• Verdy B. Queen's petals close into a rainbow bud that lifts, beats and bursts open on the new queen.
• A drop-hammer flattens the Brass Colossus and stamps him back up as it lifts.
• The Avatar of Winter freezes, cracks and shatters, and the new one thaws out of the burst.

Some final forms got more, too. The Brass Colossus vents smog from his smokestacks, and the Magma Magnate's hair goes up in blue fire. Every card a lord plays at a phase break also has its own picture now, of the lord doing it.

### The Long Dark

The Avatar of Winter's last stand tears its robe off and unfolds six arms and a serpent's body.

Behind it, the winter fortress lights up from its heart and bursts up out of the backdrop card through the clouds like an iceberg.

The fight is also quicker. Flash Freeze comes on round 2 and every third round after, the ice from Whiteout thaws after a round, and Freeze Over costs 2.

### Verdy B. Queen's meadow

When Verdy B. Queen makes her last stand, a ripple runs out of her and a rainbow meadow of paper flowers grows across the floor to the edges of the craft mat, then climbs the box wall into a wall of flowers on either side of her card. Her whole swarm turns rainbow with it.

The giant flowers on her mat and on her backdrop also turn slowly now, and clicking one whirls it.

### Rex Mortifer's Second Death

Rex Mortifer's Second Death drops the whole board into Hades.

Wally's mat goes to night when the moonbeam lands, and back to day behind the dawn. On the map, the Twin Thrones puts both final-act bosses on the tableau, facing each other.

Co-op

• Between fights you can watch your allies' screens live, one big or everyone at once, with their pointer, HP and gold on each view. Open it with V or the spyglass on the run bar. Whoever you're watching gets a note saying so.
• You can recommend a relic, an event choice or a shop item to an ally, watch them from any screen, and draw a laser on their screen.
• Click your ally's commander to poke them and hurry them along.
• Settings has a Player color row. Changing it mid-battle repaints every stand, reach ring and seat tag, for everyone in the party.
• Every party keeps its own save file, and the War Council steps through them.
• In a co-op run with more than one Eternal, each one picks his inheritance in the void, and the rest of the party warps in to watch.
• A lot of fixes for the joining player: a Fire Giant keeps its particles, a unit made a Bug mid-battle becomes a Bug on their screen too, enemy spell telegraphs count down and land like the host's, the Stolen Name and Spare Kit Bag work, and the fight opens as soon as the last stage is built instead of ten seconds later.

New events and a dice game

The Ominous Idol. Wake the idol and it plays a gem-order memory game, read straight off the story. Win it for The Wakened Idol. There are four ways out of the vault: plundered, prayed, awakened or collapsed.

The Demon of Worst Choices waits in a cave. It eats the choices you click, one row at a time, until only one is left. Its eyes follow your cursor anywhere on the screen, and its tongue lunges out to take each row.

Knucklebones is a dice game against a goblin: carved bone dice in a corrugated dice box, and a pot you can let ride.

When your potion belt is full, the swap happens at an apothecary's counter now, with the belt drawn and the flasks hanging off it.

Smaller event changes:

• Minigames arrive and leave like their own furniture. The pachinko board, the derby, the chests, the shells, the doors, the drum, the rope and the rest each come on and go off in their own way. They all play natively on a pad too.
• Coin flips are paper flip tokens, the gold Sovereign or the slate Black Cat, tumbling end over end.
• When an event changes your gold or health, you see the thing itself: coins drop onto a pile or topple off it, a heart sticker gets a sticking plaster or rips down the middle, and max HP grows a second ply of red card.
• When a curse takes a card, moths eat it instead of it burning. A cloud settles on the curse and on the card, chews holes through them and scatters.
• The Heist is a magic trick: the potion stands behind the card as it burns, then flies home.
• At the Coronation, Uncle Jim runs on and dances with you.
• Event options only show a hover when it tells you something the row doesn't.

Cloth, card and brass

The title sign hangs on two chains now and swings like an old shop sign. Click it to knock it.

Screen titles are felt banners hanging from a dowel. They sway in a breeze, and your cursor drags them as it passes.

Buttons are grosgrain ribbon pinned by two brass brads, and pressing one dents the cloth under your pointer. Each ribbon is laid by hand, a little off level, and one in three goes on visibly crooked.

The settings menu unfolds like a note folded in quarters, and folds back up when you close it.

The Compendium is a book, with a thumb index, page turns and a riffle.

The battle log is an index card filed behind End Turn, listing who played what this round.

Each status is now the thing it is, cut from card with its count printed on it, and "Backstab!", "Immune", status names and damage numbers rise off a body as cut-paper letters.

The "never chosen before" mark on card and relic offers is a folded paper compass star, and hovering it says so, on relic picks too.

• The map peek comes up like the drawbridge run backwards, and goes down like one.
• Small cards grow to hand size when you point at them: warlord starters, run summary shelves, event strips and the co-op ally fan.
• Every pack drafts to its own sound: a chimp call for Wild Pack, a prize wheel for Pandemonium, a bear trap for Trapper's Delight, a heartbeat for Bloodletting, T-rex footfalls for Giantkind.
• Hatching the egg cuts in like a handheld game encounter: three dark blinks, bands of the screen sliding in, and a chiptune evolution fanfare.

Cut-paper terrain

Every terrain type that was still stamped ovals and thin lines is now built from one kit: a bed sheet, pieces glued down with their own shadow and lit edge, and pieces that stand up off the bed. Lane waves are three staggered paper wave-cuts with a foam cap, Gloom is cut-paper fog banks with pale eyes in them, Entangle's roots wrap the legs of whatever they caught, and the ice spell is cut paper too.

Units

The units got a second pass after 0.7.14's redraw. Across every pack, hands close with four fingers and a thumb, the near arm leads from the near shoulder, feet stand together over the middle of the disc instead of straddling it, and every mouth is built from two jaws instead of one stamped grin.

A few were drawn again from scratch: the Phalanx Guard, the Lord of Misrule, the Skirmisher, the Rat Ogre, the Bloom Drone and the Petaltender, the World Tree, and the Toy Chest toys, which had been placeholder icons until now. The Young Giant holds his sheep the right way up, and the Cyclops's eye moved to the middle of his face.

Your own warlord also stands 1.5x taller on the battlefield. At his old size he read as one of his own ranks.

New cards and relics

• Boiler costs X, the game's first X card: it summons a stationary Boiler that gets +4 attack and +6 HP for each energy you put into it.
• Kunoichi replaces Shadow Veil as the Ninja's signature card. It summons a Kunoichi that deals 3 damage to nearby enemies when she lands.
• Molt: each ally in a medium area sheds a Hollow copy with half its HP and attack. Exhaust.
• Wave of Knives replaces Fan of Knives. It throws 3 knives down every lane, each spent on the next enemy it reaches for 2 damage and Bleed 1, and a volley with a knife left over hits the enemy commander.
• Goblin Horde gets three cards: Shiv Gang summons 8 Shiv Goblins whose strikes make enemies Vulnerable, Next in Line brings back 1 Rabble for each ally that died this battle, and Press Gang gives your next summon 2 more units, permanently.
• Bug Hive gets the Bug Nest, a Free Deploy nest that broods a Mite every 4 seconds.
• Crownseeker Wand, a new rare relic: your aimed spells can target the enemy commander.
• Solitary Watchfire is reworked: end your turn with energy left, and 1 of it calls 4 Torchguards.

Balance

• Units go for the enemy commander when it's close. A commander in reach outranks the body beside it, and once a unit is swinging at it, nothing else pulls it away.
• Funerary Wraps: the Mummy's units deal 75% of their attack damage (rounded up, at least 1) instead of 1 less.
• Prospector's Pan: gain 5 gold at the start of each battle (was 30 gold on every Rest).
• Thornwood Fetish hits 2 random enemies for 3 each round (was 1).
• Sharpening Strap: one unit of each summon you play gains +2 attack.
• Twist the Knife: your Backstabs apply Burn 2 as well as Bleed 2.
• Legion's Resolve gives Invulnerable 1 for each nearby enemy, at least 1, so the line in contact braces hardest.
• Behind You! is cheaper: Shuriken Adept, Muggers and Silencer cost 1, Kagemusha costs 2, and the path evolutions came down by 1. Shuriken Adept and Silencer summon 3 each, and Kagemusha summons 3 that each brood a Shadow Clone every 4 seconds.
• Long Odds costs 0.
• Fresh Levies summons 15, Exspiravit also cuts the card's cost by 1, Cover of Night adds Pounce 3, and Blightspawn strikes Fragile 2.
• The Trailblazer card summons 2 Trailblazers.
• Mini Me units have Retaliate.
• The Halberdier drops to 5 health, since his armor already takes a point off every hit.
• The Queen Bee regenerates 1 a second instead of 2 and has 27 HP.
• Small spell areas are a little bigger, so Blood Summon on a four-body squad takes all four.
• The Spaceman's lanes are called Fast Lane and Slow Lane.

Performance

• Cut-paper terrain bakes into a handful of draws. A Blight band costs about 18 draw calls instead of about 495, on every platform, with the picture unchanged.
• Units only update the parts of themselves that moved each tick, which cut the crowd's tick by about 18%.
• A card that shows another card when you hover it now builds that preview the first time you point at it, not when it is dealt. Those cards come into your hand in 5 ms instead of 12.
• A lord's landing no longer fills the log with errors every turn.
• In the browser and on phones, every battle material compiles once while the battle is being built, instead of stuttering mid-fight.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 30 September 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

The Eternal picks his inheritance

The Eternal carries relics and cards over from the last run he won. Until now the game chose them for you. Now, straight after the pack draft and before Uncle Jim sends you off, the screen warps and drops you into the void between eras: a small floating island in a papercraft sky with galaxies being born, colliding and rolling past.

Two options stand either side of the island. The hourglass holds the relics from your last winning run, and you choose one. The spiral portal deals out that run's cards, and you choose two. Each pick changes him. The relic warps into being out of his head and reshapes it as it leaves, and the two cards come out of his left and right hands, reshaping each arm. So every Eternal run starts with a slightly different Eternal.

Once both picks are made, the warp runs backwards and drops you at Uncle Jim's send-off.

If you quit inside the void, you come back to whatever is still owed.

The Mason's Wager

A guild of masons is building a watchtower at a crossroads, and the foreman is bored. She'll hang the guild's brass plumb bob round your neck if you can lay twelve courses off her crane before her sandglass runs out, which takes 40 seconds.

It's Stacker, played for real. The stone rides back and forth along the jib and you click to drop it. Whatever hangs past the course below gets sawn off, so every stone you set crooked makes the next one smaller, and a tower that wanders off its footing sways harder. A stone dropped dead true snaps square, and three true in a row win back a little width.

The prize is the Master Builder's Plumb, a new relic you can only get here: at the start of each round, your units with no Shield gain Shield 2. If you'd rather not, you can haul stone for a day's wage or walk on.

Minigames on stage cards

The Stacker was built as a flat-paper scene mounted on a card, and it looked so much better than the old minigame screens that the rest followed. Skip rope, the horse race, the shell game, the three doors, pachinko, press your luck, the bandit, the long reach, the joust, the skill check, the drum, Simon and the chest pick are all played inside their own cut-paper scene now. The orrery is set against a night sky and the auction room stands on the boards.

The Mysterious Egg hatches

Warming the Mysterious Egg at the campfire now lets you pick what hatches, in a cut-paper professor's lab: the Pterodactyls, or two new ones. The Liopleurodons are four small sea reptiles that make whatever they hit Vulnerable. The Kosmoceratops is one big armoured body with 25 HP and a Madness aura that hits friend and foe alike. Then the egg flips faster and faster until it hatches.

Every pack, drawn again

0.7.13 redrew the warlords' starters. This time it was everyone else. Nearly every unit a player can summon, pack by pack, was drawn again from scratch in flat paper, then checked over several rounds: hands that close on what they hold, arms that come off a shoulder, heads with necks, mouths built from two jaws, and a stranger shown each sheet to check they could tell every unit apart and say what it does. Each board has 0.7.13 on the top row and 0.7.14 below it, at the same scale.

The goblins were squat blocks. Now they're lanky and bent-kneed. The Warboss shouts through a megaphone, the Matron carries her brood in a pannier, and the Horde King has a sack tied at the mouth.

Half the Steel Legion used to carry its spear across its belly. The Hoplite throws his overhand now, the Phalanx Guard thrusts his, and the Knight wears the Legion's blue with a crimson bend on his shield.

The Instar line was eight green spiders. It's one green crab now that grows through eight molts, from a tiny hatchling to the spined, pincered Instar VIII.

The slimes are all one translucent jelly now, told apart by what each one is doing. Papa has a chunk being torn off, and the Engulfer has a skeleton, a horse and a tombstone inside it.

Behind You! was seven copies of one hooded ninja. Now it's a street crew with faces, top hats, silks and a swag bag.

The giants were five identical brown blocks. Each one now carries something small for scale, like a sheep, a fir tree or a torch, so they read as big. The Storm Titan has his own raincloud.

The traps used to be lumps of dirt. Every one is a device now. The Deathtrap is a sawblade engine and the Frag Charge is a bundle of rolled paper tubes with a fuse.

Bug Hive, Siege Works, Vanguard, Draw and Order, Forbidden Lore, The Wasting, Mutagenesis, Bloodletting and the neutral units got the same treatment. There was also a colour pass. A lot of units had been printed as grey ramps waiting for a tint, and now they have their materials: the Winter bodies are glacier ice, the Knight has his livery, and the cinder hounds look like banked coals.

The Pale Rider was redrawn too. He's a ghost cowboy on a pale horse now, with a revolver instead of the scythe, and he fights differently: before he rides off, he sends riders down every road, and more come up to guard the cairn he comes back in at.

Paper that moves

Removing cards used to fade them out under an orange tint. Now each card lifts and shivers as a glow swells behind it, catches at a corner, and burns away one after another, the same fire the letters burn in. This plays for event sacrifices, the shop's brazier and Jim's boons.

Everything printed on the battle mat is a toy now. Poke a piece and it hops, flips or sinks into the paper. Trees shake off their leaves, and some pieces let a bird or a ghost out or take off and come back.

Earning an achievement pops a plate in the lower left with your warlord's paper doll dancing on it and confetti across the screen, at the same moment as Steam's own toast. In co-op your allies see yours, in your colour.

Balance

• Every Path of Evolution level now has one safe choice: the card it replaces, only better. The other choice is still the wild one. Wailing Host and Read Further are spells again.
• Spellburn Circlet: the first exhaust each round refunds 1 energy. It used to deal 4 damage to eight enemies on every burn.
• Shadow Step only frees summons that cost 1 energy or less.
• Spells that summon, like Thrall Call, now get Conscription and Full Ranks like any other summon.
• Cattle Drive and Longship Levy put +1 unit on every summon, as the card says.
• Growth: Time Skip grows on Growth's own clock, Wild Growth also skips 6 seconds for the allies it catches, Metamorphosis quickens Growth a unit gains later, and Overgrowth stacks onto Growth a unit already has.
• The Rapt-Boar hits for 2 again.
• Bill's fight: The Mob Answers comes at half health, and the first half is lighter.
• The Nightmare is back to 10 HP and 5 attack.

Smaller things

The compendium has a Filters tray: card type, cost, rarity, card art, statuses, unit kind and keywords, each with its own scrolling list and a count per pack.

There are twelve player colours now; Cobalt, Mint, Plum and Umber are new. On character select only the front warlord's disc is painted in your colour.

• Right-click on the battlefield pings, and right-drag draws the laser, like the pen on the map.
• 38 spells that used the generic rune line now each have their own line when you aim them.
• The Action camera (still off by default, in Settings > Display) watches what is about to happen, like queued enemy spells and lit fuses, and frames all of it instead of following one swing.
• Your spot on the map is circled in red ink under a pool of lamplight, and the map's pen lands like real ink.
• HP is a red paper heart in the top bar.
• 306 event epilogues were rewritten in plainer prose.
• The paper tint over the battle mat is off by default. The box is still in Settings > Display.
• Co-op: a joiner can summon onto their Landing Pad, a joiner's ranged units show their real reach, fused pairs keep both members' powers, and the Regicide's contract pays out even when the throne's riposte kills it.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 27 September 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

The same day also brought standees that stand at full height, backdrops and mats printed in flat paper, a brighter battlefield, and a pile of smaller changes listed at the end.

Every starter, drawn again

Each board has 0.7.12 on the top row and 0.7.13 below it. These are the prints the game ships, side by side at the same scale.

The new ones have designed faces, hands that grip what they hold, and poses that do something. The Northman's helmet sits down on his head with its nasal running down his nose, and his beard starts at the mouth so his cheek and ear show. The Harpooner is winding up a throw, and the Shinobi leaves a puff of smoke behind him.

Every one of these went through several rounds of checking where each piece joins the next: shoulders under the head instead of beside the ear, arms that bend at a round elbow, boots that close round the shin, the Deadeye's rifle butt in his shoulder and the scope at his eye. Anything that read as a playing-card suit or a symbol (a diamond belt stone, a club-shaped key, a buckle that looked like a pause button) was redrawn as the thing it was meant to be.

Two faces were done twice. The first redraw of the Ray Gunner and the Deputy looked crazy, so the Ray Gunner is now a relaxed, cocky cadet and the Deputy an eager rookie.

Standees stand up

Units used to be squashed a little to match the camera's tilt. It was meant to look like a flat piece seen from above, and it made every unit look short and squat. They now stand at full height, seated across the middle of their disc, and each stand is one thick sheet of corrugated board with the flutes showing on its edge.

The stage

Every lord's backdrop card and the mat under the lanes are printed in flat paper now, in the same style as the card backdrops. The dark ink outlines are gone and each piece has a lit edge and a soft shadow.

A fight also opens differently. Before, the pieces appeared in place and then settled. Now the backdrop card, the mat, the lanes, the scenery and both commanders drop in from above the frame one after another, and the bottom of the HUD rises up from below the screen.

The colour grade over the battlefield was too dark and too grey, especially down the left side of the screen. It is brighter and more saturated now, without pushing the kraft board and the greys into odd colours. The pairs below are the old grade and the new grade on the same field.

If you miss the old look, Settings > Display has a new Kraft edge box. It puts the brown die-cut band back under units, icons and commanders, and it works mid-battle.

Ascension

When a pack ascends, the form's name is now the headline, printed on its own cut-paper sign, and each of the 22 forms has a sign dressed for it. The Living Flame's burns, the Stormforged's is struck by lightning, and the First Ooze's drips.

Relics and wagers

Taking a relic from the strongbox burns the card where it stands, and its gem comes out of the fire and flies up to your relic bar. This is the same burn the merchant's shelf already had, and it now plays for elite spoils and Jim's drawer too. The strongbox also keeps its velvet lining now; before, the screen showed through it.

The Devil's Wager has three wagers now, plus walking away:

• The doubled-gold pact, as before.
• A fight half again as hard, for an extra relic pick.
• A race against the clock: win inside five rounds for 150 gold, or lose 15 HP.

Take any of them and the page turns to him shaking your hand.

The Old Standard-Bearer now offers one banner from a pool of four, each paid for in max HP:

• Banner of the Unbroken (-10 HP).
• Captured Colors (-8 HP): the first enemy to fall each round rises as 2 Ghosts on your side.
• Rallying Pennant (-12 HP): 2 Recruits each round on your thinnest lane.
• Flag of Parley (-8 HP): at the end of each round, Charm 4 on the enemy closest to switching sides.

The end of a run

Beating the Act 3 boss now plays a song of its own, "Cardboard Conquest Victory". It fades in when the boss falls and carries on over the verdict page, the menu and the next draft.

The credits are laid out on paper: each department is its own card of stock, slightly askew, and the last card, pinned with rosettes, prints your name. Here it printed mine.

Smaller things

• Text that used to float over the field or the desk in a black halo, like "+5 max HP", "-15 HP" and the gold ticks, is now printed on a paper slip cut to fit. Spending gold tints the coin red again, since that was easier to read.
• The lethal skull over a unit about to die is a cut-paper skull that bobs gently, with no red badge round it.
• The flanker warning is a cut-paper red exclamation mark, and the Flanker keyword panel shows the same mark so you learn what it means.
• In masked pair fights, every card, hover and telegraph wears the portrait of the commander it belongs to, and a unit stands in its own commander's world.
• The Mimic wears the painted warlord sign of the player it copies, reading "The Mimic".
• Co-op: when a player ends their turn, their commander squares up and a pennant in their colour reading "Ready" pops up off the back of the stand.
• Hive bug parts line up with the flat-paper bugs, and all twelve parts can stack on one bug at once.
• Friendly auras (charm, burn, heals, rallies) roll out along the road instead of laying a red hazard disc beside it.
• Aiming any spell hides the hovered unit's range ring and march ghost.
• A selected card's check seal covers the whole corner crest instead of leaving a ring of it showing.
• Sleeping Jim's Zzz are cut from night-blue card, so they show up against the smoke.
• Victory on an ordinary fight is just VICTORY, without the line under it.

Balance

• Frost Giant's upgrade is +8 damage (was a cost drop).

Fixes

• A wave or a wall of fire now hits everything standing on the road it runs over, including units on a crossing road. Before, bodies in the middle of the road often walked away untouched.
• Status numbers round up: a Poison of 0.4 shows as Poison 1, never Poison 0.
• Masked Challengers: when one of the pair dies, the survivor's taunt plays on its own without a banner over it.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 25 September 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

This post covers everything since 0.7.9, because 0.7.10 and 0.7.11 went out without one. The flat paper look comes first, then the new screen transitions, then what the bosses do now, and a long list after that.

Flat paper

Here is the same fight twice, frozen on the same turn. The top half is 0.7.11 and the bottom half is 0.7.12.

The old units were cut out of cardboard with a brown kraft band round every figure and a dark ink line inside it. At the size a unit stands on the board, that band and the line were most of what you saw. Without them the colours carry the figure, and you can tell units apart across a crowded lane.

Closer in, the Avatar of Winter's host and the Brass Colossus's foundry crew:

All 1,238 unit and commander drawings were printed again, so every pack looks different. The King's Recruit, Archer and Spearman were drawn again by hand for the new look, and they are the first three below.

Every warlord's starter:

The big ones, where the kraft band used to eat the most detail:

And the other side of the table:

A few units were redrawn while this was going on, because losing the outline showed what was wrong with them. The Blue Jay was a blue ball with an orange wedge for a beak. It is a real jay now, with a swept crest, a white face in a black necklace and barred wings, sitting on a twig. The Beatdown Cop's nose read as two lumps once its outline went, so he has one broken boxer's nose. The second body types of the Gunslinger, the Boxer and the Viking got stronger arms.

Commanders

Your warlord and every enemy commander got the same treatment, rig piece by rig piece, including the Gilded and Ascendant looks.

The enemy commander icons on the map, the card stamps and the Compendium had drifted away from the commanders you actually fight. They are now cut from each lord's real rig, standing at rest, so the face on the map is the face across the board.

Spells, powers and card faces

All 733 spell and power icons were printed again in the same style. The card face's chips (cost, attack, health, squad size, rarity) and the pack crests lost their keylines too.

Paper transitions

When you win, the spoils screen crumples into a ball and is thrown off the desk, and the chart is already underneath.

Picking a node on the chart drops the chart back like a drawbridge, and the desk round it pleats away to show where you are going.

A shop or an event shuts like a book when you leave it.

Buying something burns it off the shelf: the relic's plate and its price tag burn away around the gem, and the gem flies up to your bar.

Losing is a flat paper card that drops in over both commanders and tears through the middle. It waits for a click, and then the whole battlefield crumples into the run summary.

A card that gets exhausted from your hand burns up like a letter in its own slot, and the fan closes once the fire is out.

A newly unlocked card is traced into being: a black silhouette, then its outline drawn in light, then the picture burns into colour and the burn spreads across the card.

Uncle Jim's panels arrive as a crumpled paper ball and unfold, and his screens leave in character. His send-off peels off the desk like a sticker, and when he is wearing the wizard hat, his check-in shatters into sparkling shards.

The boot card gets bitten away, and then the whole mat falls forward onto the title screen.

Players who came back after their first ten minutes get a thank-you letter now, and every letter in the game burns when you close it.

Bosses

When the Magma Magnate's kiln opens, the box burns. Once his last banner closes, the whole back wall catches at his kiln and burns away like a letter held over a candle. Behind it is his magma cavern, with lava running in flat paper bands and a gallery of his demons on the ledges, watching. The camera pulls all the way out before the wall catches so you see all of it.

The Avatar of Winter's arena is a snow globe. Snow piles up around the lane board as he loses health, and when he plays The Long Dark he shakes it: a gusting blizzard, frost growing in over the glass, the drifts icing over. His phase slam cracks the glacier down his own roads.

When the Brass Colossus stands up his foundry, the lights brown out. The room sags, stutters, sags browner and then catches, with a zap and an arc across the columns of the hall.

Rex Mortifer keeps a gallery of the dead. Every fighter you lose comes back as a translucent ghost, drifts off its body to a spot along the verge and stays there, breathing in and out of sight. The crowd thickens over the fight until the oldest start to fade out for the newcomers.

Wally's howl rolls down his own roads now. Every boss slam in the game hits the ground along that boss's lanes, 24 of them, each with its own marks, where they all used to share one shock ring.

Enemy plays are shown to you now. Each card comes up full size, aims, and is filed away, and a boss's phase beats play as cards the same way. Click, or press A, to skip.

The fly-over at the start of a boss fight visits every enemy commander, so when you fight two, the second one gets to taunt too.

The finishers were cleaned up so nothing blinks into the shot. Props get carried in, picked up or dropped in, and the snuffer lid comes down over the whole Fire Devil.

Every warlord has a second body

There is a switch on the muster wheel now that turns every warlord over to a second body type, drawn in the same style as the first. The King's other cut is the Queen, and the game calls her that everywhere her name appears: the muster sign, the Compendium, the lobby, the draft and the battle plates. Her title and blurb are translated in all ten languages. The Wasting's warlord got redrawn along the way as a plague herald with one censer, instead of a figure on two crutches.

Reading the fight

• Aiming a spell puts a skull over every unit it will certainly kill. It checks armor, shields, Fragile and Vulnerable the same way the hit does, and shows nothing when the kill is not certain (Undying, Invulnerable, a coin flip).
• Enemy summon cards hold for 1.6 seconds so you can read them, and the same card bought twice in a turn shows once, with the combined cost and bodies.
• Before you drop a unit, its outline stands where it will land and walks its lane.
• While you carry a card, the relics and powers it will set off breathe.
• Hovering a card in your hand no longer pops tips and range rings up on the field underneath it.
• Every enemy lord aims with his own reticle.

New cards and relics

• Sergeant's Dice Cup, a relic holding five card-reward rerolls. A Reroll plate sits beside Skip and turns each offer over in turn.
• Dragon Egg hatches one of eight coloured Dragons, each with its own On Strike.
• Sharpening Strap: the first summon each round gives a random unit +2 attack.

Sound

Summons land with a dry cardboard thwack and every spell card casts with a card flick, both recorded, each in several takes so two in a row never match. Melee hits come from recordings too. Metal deaths, growth spells and transform spells have new sounds, and cards that used to play two sounds on one frame now play one.

Balance

• Crown volleys: every unit on your commander's home ground blocks a shot, and the salvo flies the moment your turn ends.
• Beatdown Cop: 18 HP, 6 damage (was 13 and 4).
• Magma Magnate's crew hit for 1: Kiln Wretch attack 4 to 1, Ladle Runner 2 to 1. Both still set you Burning. Fire Front is Burn 1 and nothing else. Slag Brute's When Struck is Thorns 1 instead of Burn 1.
• Avatar of Winter: The Long Dark hits the whole board for 3 instead of 8, and no longer enrages him.
• Rex Mortifer's Bonewalker lays 2 skeletons instead of 4, and the Revenant has 10 HP.
• Offering costs 1 energy per soul instead of a card. Its upgrade widens the circle.
• Mystery Egg costs 1. Upgraded, it costs 2 and lays 4 eggs.
• Funerary Wraps: the Mummy's units deal 1 less damage (minimum 1), instead of half.
• Chaos Cocktail's Earthquake wedge splits only the enemy's army now.
• An upgraded Slime King bursts into 5 upgraded Slimes.
• Instar molts every 7 seconds, and every 5 when upgraded.
• Thirteen enemies moved on the 2026-09-16 telemetry round: the Bloodhorn hounds and bull ease off, act 2 and 3 fights get their length back, and Winter loses 13 HP.

Fixes

• A huge crowd can no longer drag the game down to 5 frames a second. Past a limit the fight plays in slow motion instead, and crowded boards draw far less than they did.
• Flankers no longer stack into one sprite.
• Night Vigilante stays in the lane it blinked into.
• A Cauldron's second Chaos Cocktail waits for the first wheel to stop.
• The Shattered Icon's Saint keeps the grudge the sexton warns you about.
• Auto End Turn waits for summoned bodies to land, then ends faster.
• Press-any-key screens ignore Shift, Ctrl, Alt, the Windows key and the lock keys.
• The game no longer asks for an itch rating.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 25 September 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

Every card backdrop is cut paper now

Start with the cards you draw on turn one. The King's Recruits, Archers and Spear Line used to stand in front of a flat curtain wall with two banners on it. They stand in his muster yard now, inside his own wall, in the morning, with the practice stakes and the kit laid out.

Every warlord got the same treatment. On each board below the top row is what 0.7.7 put behind that warlord's starter cards and the bottom row is what 0.7.8 does. The Mummy's necropolis is the tomb mouth in hard desert light, with the jackal at the door. The Pirate's deck is her own, the sun going down over the swell, wheel and rope and a barrel of the good stuff. The Viking's shore is the shingle at the head of a fjord with the longship drawn up on it and the fire lit, and the Witch's fen is the deep swamp at dusk with her hut standing in it on its legs, one window lit.

The Ninja's courtyard has no moon on purpose: the only light on the sheet is the temple lanterns. The Eternal's field is several eras standing in the same ground under a violet night, a standing stone and a broken column and a rusting engine in one field. The Spaceman gets grey regolith on an airless world with the planet he claimed hanging over it. The Boxer gets the ring under the hall lamps, and the Gunslinger the head of a frontier town on red hardpan with the sun nearly down.

Now the packs. Each of the twenty got one place, and that place is drawn three times: at rest for the summons, at the thing the pack is built around for the powers, and mid-surge for the spells. Each board below is one pack, the three scenes across, 0.7.7 above and 0.7.8 below.

Steel Legion stands in Coldmuster, the drill yard dug in behind the rampart at the grey hour before the muster is called. The powers are taken up at the muster stand at the end of the yard. The spells are the same yard with the wall locked.

The Wasting is Chalk Street, the sealed row of a lazar-town where nobody has come out for eleven days. The powers are drawn at the vinegar table the plague doctor keeps set up in the middle of the row. The spells are the moment the sickness lets go, the fog lying wide and shallow along the street.

Slime Swarm has the Ninth Arch Sump, the flooded cavern under the broken aqueduct where the water stopped being water. Powers come off the Drawing Font at the cistern. Spells are the sump in flood, the cavern filling.

Spectral Host stands in Hollowmere Yard, the burying ground whose gate was broken open one winter and never mended. The powers are lifted off the dead at the bier end. The spell scene has nobody in it at all, only the ground given up.

Siege Works is Longshot Battery, the gun pit dug in behind an earthwork, seen from inside the works looking out over the parapet. The powers are the great sling stood alone in the middle of the pit. The spells are the whole line going off together.

Wild Pack has the Bone Gully, the den at the head of the scree where the pack sleeps a kill off. The powers are the kill-stone, the broad low boulder everything gets dragged back to. The spells are the night the hunt goes out under a blood moon, and nothing alive is drawn: the hunt is told by what it left.

Goblin Horde stands on the Muckstack, the shanty warren the horde has piled up the side of a spoil hill, at rest before the shout goes up. The powers are the muster ring at the foot of it. The spells are the warren emptying itself down the hill the moment the drum goes.

On the cards themselves. Pack Wolves, Thick Fur and Blood Moon on the left are the three Wild Pack scenes; Goblin Archers, Goblin Drum and Conscription on the right are the three Goblin Horde ones.

Draw and Order is Whistle Lane, the wet back alley behind the Fourth Watch-house, where the night shift keeps its bins, its crates and its evidence. The powers are the lead board the squad has dragged out into the alley. The spells are mid-raid, the whole shift coming out of the doors at once.

Final Rites is the Reckoning Yard, the undertakers' working yard behind the funerary chapel at dusk. It is a trade, not a haunting: coffins on trestles, the cart, the ledger. The powers are settled at the tithe table at the far end. The spells are mid-rite, the offering pit paid.

Primordial Growth has the Broodroot, the hatchery grove held in the buttress roots of one enormous tree, where everything on the floor is either an egg or about to be. The powers are the seed vault at the far end of the grove. The spells are the whole hatchery coming up at once.

Trapper's Delight is the Snare Line, the working clearing at the head of a trapline, and the near foreground belongs to one bear trap. The powers are the trigger bench, the low table in the middle of the clearing where a trap is set. The spells are the instant the whole clearing goes off.

Vanguard is the Marchfield, the muster ground at first light, struck and standing ready to move off. The powers are taken up at the muster table. The spells are the instant the order goes, the camp still standing behind the column that has already left it.

Overgrowth stands in the Broodroot; Bear Traps, Switcheroo and Munitions on the Snare Line; Light Cavalry, Redeploy and Vanguard Charge on the Marchfield.

Forbidden Lore is the Chained Scriptorium, the locked end of a library where the books are belted shut and read anyway. The powers are copied at the lectern in the middle. The spells are a page spent that does not come back.

Behind You! is the Sparrow Walk, the guild's rooftop road over the sleeping quarter, three hours after the lamps went out. The powers are the drop-box, the guild's dead-letter cache. The spells are the job going off, the place unchanged and legible under it.

Errant Whispers, Read Aloud and Revelation in the scriptorium; Footpads, Fan of Knives and Cover of Night on the roofs.

Heartbreakers is Sweetbriar Terrace, the outside of the ballroom at the end of a long night. The powers are the letter table, the end of the terrace where the writing gets done. The spells are mid-charm, the whole garden coming apart and going over the house.

Pandemonium is the Crooked Row, the gambling end of a travelling fair after the crowd has gone, pitched on a slope so nothing on it is level. The powers are the prize wheel, the one thing on the row everybody queues for. The spells are the row going over.

Bug Hive is the Wax Gallery, a room the swarm chewed out of a hollow trunk and then rebuilt in wax. The powers are the royal cell the whole hive is built around. The spells are the hive roused, the comb wall sheared open.

Mutagenesis is the Decanting Cellar, the vaulted undercroft where the growing vats are kept warm and nobody has mopped since the last one went over. The powers are the dosing end, where a dose is drawn and something goes past its limit. The spells are the vats going over.

Giantkind is the High Shoulder, the camp giants keep on the mountain's shoulder, built throughout at the wrong scale for people. The powers are the mark-stone, the carved menhir the camp's oaths are taken at. The spells are the moment something the size of the mountain puts its weight down.

Test Subjects, Growth Serum and Hypertrophy in the cellar; Young Giant, Embiggen and Giant's Blood on the shoulder; and Uncontrolled Pupation, on the left, in the Wax Gallery.

Bloodletting is the Letting Crypt, the vault under the count's hall where the tithe is taken and kept. The powers are the slab, the one stone the vault is built around. The spells are the crypt paid in full, the drain channel running over.

Pyromancy's Burning Ward was the first of these places and shipped last time, so it is not on a board above. Its spell scene was redrawn once more for this build: the fire is rooted and nested rather than stacked, the firewhirl is one column growing out of the yard, and the wall of flame is three ranks licking up behind the braziers instead of a row of separate tongues.

Three scenes are left for cards that belong to no pack and no warlord, and they used to be three unrelated drawings: a green hill, a night sky, a sunburst. They are one place now, the muster field, drawn three ways: by day for a summon, at night with the stones lit for a spell, and with the standard raised for a power. And every curse in the game stands in a bog, the sour one with the thing in it that is still watching.

Fifteen cards have no frame: the painting is the face. Their cut-paper twins were drawn flat, and they are cut from paper now like everything else on the table. Balor stands between the two bright things in his picture. Quickening is a battlefield where everything has stopped in the air. The Regicide is the hall after the fact, the empty throne under the rose window and the crown on the step. The Sunset Duelist is cut flat against a sun the size of the sky. The Pterodactyl has stopped reading as a manta ray.

Haggle is the bargain being struck. Overdraft is the vault open with the light coming out of it faster than it went in. Pocket Spark is two cupped hands on a cold night around one live ember. The Promissory Note is a gloved hand out of the dark. The Volunteers are four farmhands on the ridge at first light with the tools they own. Mirror's Due is the thing in the glass that has stopped copying you, and the Painful Letter is the envelope from Motley Jack's road, still sealed, which you will meet below.

The back wall of the arena

The arena is a box on a desk: a mat taped down, a rank of standing pieces, and a card taped to the back wall. Until now the card and the mat were one drawing cut in half at a fixed line, so the card was whatever happened to lie in the top band of a vista drawn for something else. They are two pieces now, each printed from a picture composed for its own job. Every lord's lair already was a picture, from 0.7.7. The theme stages, the fights that are not a lord's signature fight, were not: their card came out as sky, two soft ridge lines and a strip of ground, a blank sheet with a fold in it, behind every ordinary fight in that region. Twenty-nine of them got a back wall this build. Eight of those, old over new.

In the box, the Castle stage: the curtain wall given a gate to be the wall of, the keep behind it, the town's roofs in front, and the standing rank on the seam below.

The Bazaar: domes and a minaret over a staggered run of awnings, lantern lines strung the whole width of the card, and two loaded camels padding in on the left.

The Volcano: the cone, erupting, and everything else in the picture either lit by it or in the way.

Wally's card is a special case. His backdrop stays mostly sky on purpose, because the sky is the mechanic: the sun going down is the countdown, and the moon that takes over is drawn on the card. What his card gained is the wood, a treeline the length of the horizon with the lane out of the village left as a gap in it. It is painted rather than propped, so it takes the night re-dye with the rest of the plate and turns from a pleasant treeline into a wall of teeth on the same crossfade the village does.

Motley Jack

The Brass Pilgrim's three-part chain, the dead king and the words nobody could say, is gone. In its place is Motley Jack, an explorer you meet three times over twenty years. The first time he is young and in a temple, up to his elbows in the altar, and lying in a cradle of nested stone rings is the first of three rings of brass.

The cradle is the ring puzzle: four rings, each brought to its notch, and turning one carries every ring inside it. Win or lose, the page turns to his journal and you read what he thinks he is doing out here. Lose, and he prises the ring out anyway with a bar and most of the skin off one hand, and writes the last line left-handed.

Carry the ring and it rides on your baggage cart wrapped in a blanket: a Large Brass Ring that blinds whatever hurts your commander, once a round. Twenty years later he is in a rented room full of red string, with the second ring on a cord round his neck and a letter from his wife that he cannot bring himself to open. The Medium Brass Ring comes with the letter, and the letter is a card: the Painful Letter, a curse in your deck until the road is walked to its end. You can also cut the string down and make him sleep, which heals you, or sell him back the large ring for more coin than he has.

The third time he is old, on the same altar, and the page turns to the letter itself. His wedding ring is inside it. Set the three rings together, the two brass ones you carried and the one out of the envelope, and the letter leaves your deck, both relics leave your belt, and the Completed Ring takes their place: one more energy every battle, and a shield on your unshielded units at the end of every round.

The achievement for seeing his road to its end is called Three of Three now.

The Sealed Grove

A new event, and a parody of a certain very large tabletop game whose name is not going to appear here. A druid circle has sealed its grove against a camp of horned refugees, and you arrive with a party that will be familiar in outline and a small wet thing behind one eye that hums. Every row on the page is a skill check, played for real: Persuasion to argue the refugees' case, Arcana to chant along with the rite, Deception to insist you are nobody worth the trouble.

Hover a row and it tells you the terms of the check and nothing else: the mark to beat, the skill, and where the modifier comes from. The modifier is read off your deck. Persuasion gets one for every card in your deck that costs three or more. Arcana gets one for every spell. Deception gets one for every starter card you are still carrying, which is why its mark is 21: a plain deck is the whole disguise.

Then you throw the die, and it is a die: twenty faces of card, numbered so that opposite faces add to twenty-one, turned in three dimensions and tumbling across a dark dial until it comes to rest with one face up. Nothing is rolled in advance for you to watch a picture of. The face is decided at the throw and the tumble is turned to land on it.

When it lands, the modifier slaps down on a manila card to the left of the dial, the total counts up on a file card to the right while the pips light round the ring, and a strip lands the verdict. A natural 20 carries the roll whatever the mark, with a star and a shower of scraps, and opens a third branch on each row that a plain success does not. A natural 1 is a critical failure, and the page says so.

Nine endings, three per row, and each one turns to its own page with its own picture. Argue well and the horned camp passes a hat; argue badly and the snake casts the deciding vote in your ankle; roll the 20 and the archdruid roars the motion carried and hands you something off the altar so nobody else can steal it. Chant well and the circle teaches you a verse, which is a card; crack, and the thing behind your eye learns a word, which is a curse. Convince the gate you are nobody and it opens; get seen through and a horned girl with no shame at all relieves you of your purse while the guards argue over whether a squid counts as a weapon.

The party is inspired by its models and drawn from none of them, which is the only way a parody like this gets to stay in the game.

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

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

The blood moon

Every other act boss in the game stands back up when you kill it. Wally never did, and the reason was good: his moonrise already doubles his health and turns his whole village into wolves, so a second life on top of that was a third. He has one now, and his health bar moved from 26 to 50 to pay for it.

It works like this. Land the killing blow and the sky does not stop, it reverses. The moon he already dragged up sinks back to the rooftops, and then climbs the far side of the boundary again, bleeding copper as it comes. The palette of the whole village goes with it, and so does every shadow on the field. Then the light finds him, his bones go a second time, and he howls, and the howl throws your entire line back down its lanes and leaves Madness in all of it.

Then the clock stops. A blood moon does not set. There is no dawn coming to halve his bar and walk his wolves home, so the night book, the doubled health and the pack are what the rest of the fight is fought against.

The Neighbor

The thing that stands up is Were-Wally with his hackles raised. Same wolf, same four sheets of paper, plus the one thing his last stand grows: a ruff of raised fur that stands out past both shoulders and frames him without covering his face. He is a third again as big and hits half again as hard.

His sign is the third state of one piece of wood, and that is worth looking at all at once. Wally hangs a friendly shingle from two good strings, with a painted border, stitched hems and a daisy on it. Were-Wally's is that same shingle after moonrise: one string snapped, the sign swinging from the other, claws dragged through both ends and the daisy hanging upside down by a thread. This one has stopped hanging. It is nailed flat through opposite corners by something that does not own a hammer, split along the grain, and the claw gouges go clear through the wood with the red moon showing in them. Where the daisy was there is a nail hole and a dry stem.

The wood

The village spends the whole fight being a village. Cottages, a noticeboard, a sundial, a street of neighbours watching from the verge. The last stand takes that away. A wood comes up through the ground the crowd is standing on, tall and bare and black, every limb forked out and reaching in over the board, and the fight finishes inside it.

They come up in rings out of him, on the same beat the light changes, and they keep leaning for the rest of the fight. They are pressed out of card like the cottages are: one blade round the whole silhouette, a folded easel behind, and the desk lamp's own shadow thrown off them onto the mat.

Two things in the village that were wrong

The scarecrows were bigger than the houses. A scarecrow is a coat on a pole and a cottage is a building, and on this square the tallest scarecrow was standing level with the ridge of the house next to it. They are about two fifths of the house nearest them now, which is the proportion a real yard has.

And the meadow keeps a pine with claw marks in it, which is a nice piece of storytelling that was being told badly: nine brown strokes painted across the branches, in a brown close enough to the trunk that they read as nine sticks lying on the tree. It is one swipe now, and the rakes are tears rather than stripes, with bare wood showing where the wound is actually open.

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

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

Every lord has a lair, cut from paper

A lord's back wall was its theme's back wall, and a theme is shared. Two things fixed that, in order.

First, what stands in front of the wall. Thirty-nine lords got thirty-nine kits of cut pieces, where the main piece is one commander's signature and never another's, the second piece is unique across the roster too, and two lords who share a theme now share its floor and its sky and nothing on its wall.

Then the wall. Forty-two backdrops, one per lord, cut one at a time, each an authored scene. Verdy B. Queen's Hive Garden is a loam bank cut open on tongues of wild comb, with queen cells and honey strings, her hive over its guarded mouth, a punched sun, a bee route, and the beekeeper's box and frame at the floor edge.

Rex Mortifer's Bone Throne is a colossal chair of femur stiles and a ribcage back under a skull-crested arch, ghostfire braziers throwing mint light on the flags, and a crypt heaved open with a skeletal arm climbing out. The Elder Treant's Rootheart is a mother-log across the top of the sheet with its splayed root flare, sawn face and bark curl, moss curtains, a forked sapling, a dead snag, and ferns, roots and toadstools on a litter floor.

The Brass Colossus's Assembly Hall is him in pieces: a branching bolt jumping torus to torus under the roof truss and striking at his shoulder, his arm hung on hook and spreader with its claw open, a shin and boot in a wheeled cradle, a rack of cast fingers and the great hand on its pallet.

The Pale Rider's Last Road paces gable-capped milestones along the verge, the crow reading the number on the nearest, the dead tree carrying its one lit lantern, a horse's skull and ribs in the bone tumbleweed, and every shadow raking the same way off a low moon. Wally's village square has a punched moon rising behind the cottage row, a villager howling on the ridge, the well with its cat, a tipped barrow, a dropped lantern and clawed prints crossing the green.

The Avatar of Winter's Frozen Throne is a fluted ice back crested with icicles on a three-step dais, two fractured armrest blocks on their brackets, aurora curtains torn along the hem and mirror shards raking their shadows over the crust. Haft and Hew's Divided Camp is one scene split on the diagonal and mirrored: his stake line runs from the near floor edge back to the horizon, hers runs out of the opposite corner, his sister's tent is alight under a banner torn to match his own, and on her half their father's point is reforged and driven into the earth.

The Cursemonger's Charm Bazaar hangs three charm lines between crooked posts, a lit hand of glory among the bottles and bones, her stall of remedies and wax dolls, a lantern-lit counter with its rigged scale, and the black cat crossing with the light in its eyes.

The bestiary and the hover card on the battlefield show the paper lair too, where they were still showing the older drawn one.

A fused fight's back wall wears both commanders' scenery now. The mat was already torn per commander and the card printed per commander, but everything standing in front of the card came from the first commander's theme alone, so a Frost Yeti drawn first stood snowdrifts and arctic clouds along the foot of a Fire Devil's volcano. The scenery splits on the tear the mat is taped along. The mat under each half is that commander's own paper as well, rather than the theme's ground: Grix and Sift both hold the Middens, and their tear used to be the same brown on either side.

The box gets its depth back

Screenshots of the game read as an illustrated map with a cardboard flavour. The picture it is meant to be is a box of paper on a desk. A round of changes went in to close that gap, each on its own knob so it could be turned back to where it was. Three came back within the hour. The rest went to an approval page that showed the same frame with each piece on and off, and it split them four and four. What went is out of the code, not switched off.

Then the polygons went too. The mat had been dressed with code-cut paper: tufts and mounds along the road shoulders, offcuts, a loose disc, a piece in the lord's corner. The note on one of them, beside a drawn curio: "these don't fit together ... just some rough polygons with a white angular border ... a shortcut representing something like a trash bag. remove these again from all the arenas." Every one is gone. What stands in front of the back wall is a rank of drawn pieces, about eighty-five of them, including one for every wall kind a lord names (the goblin's shanty tower, the yeti's serac, the lich's mausoleum, the queen's skep), each pressed out of card with a rim, an easel tab and one cast shadow, which is the footing the pokeable curios already stood on. And the theme's own picture is printed into the pockets the lanes leave in the mat, which used to be bare sheet.

What stayed: standing scenery on the skirt below the lanes, two to four standees tall and clear of every corridor by its whole height, with the lamp's shadow; standees 1.3 times bigger, visually only, with footprint, spacing and hit radius untouched; a denser, taller rank in the midground that no longer stands aside for a busy card; and more of the sheet's pulp tooth, with a whiter core on its cut edges. The skirt got one note of its own: "I don't understand these green blobs. the shadow makes it look like they are floating." They were the meadow's bushes, a low dome cut for tiny warren dressing, stood at ten times that size under a cast shadow. Anything that lies on the ground (bushes, mounds, drifts, pools, rubble) never stands on the skirt now. A meadow's skirt is blossoms.

What went:

• The five-ply lane stack. "adding extra layers messed up a bunch of effects, like the lane effects like spaceman, the commanders, maybe enemy unit spawns, tons of stuff." Five plies put the top of the stack 30 px above the lane path where two put it at 12, and the path is where every unit, spawn tile, lane effect and commander's court is placed. One bug fix from it holds at any ply count: the hand that assembles the stage lays as many tiers as the stack has, instead of folding the fourth and fifth into the third.
• The back wall cut into a sky sheet and a skyline sheet that leaned with the camera by different shares. "in the world, the backwall is one wall with that backdrop taped to it, it shouldn't be cut and have different effects on different pieces." The back wall is one wall.
• The mat print's contrast change. "i don't like the mat contrast change."
• The saturation cap and the fold toward bare paper. "i want this game to be more colorful not less."
• A denser lamp, a strip of wall reserved in every framing, and a dodge that pushed any sheet dyed near kraft to bone or terracotta.

A boss stands a cast of its own

The brief for it: "boss battles in particular [should] be awesome and special ... don't repeat any interactable and make sure each one has a healthy roster of unique, bespoke interactables." A boss's field now stands its whole cast, more pieces than an ordinary field and standing closer together, with nothing from the shared theme pool. Twenty curios were drawn for it.

• The Elder Treant: a woodpecker that drums, a nest that hatches, acorns that sprout.
• Verdy B. Queen: a watering can that grows a flower, a bush whose butterflies take off, a birdbath with a bird that bathes, sings and laps the garden.
• The Magma Magnate: a geyser, a volcanic bomb, a salamander on a hot rock.
• The Brass Colossus: a bulb that pops and mends itself, a dynamo that arcs, a tin soldier that marches, falls and springs back.
• Rex Mortifer: a coffin with a hand in it, an hourglass that turns itself, a pile of skulls, a candelabra that burns green.
• The Avatar of Winter: a snowman that sneezes, an ice lantern, a fox that pounces, a sled that runs.

The ones that move stand on their own base, and the props are drawn at one unit to the pixel, so a poke lands on the drawing: the beak on the bark, the flame on the wick.

Grab the ground and pull

Left-drag pans the battlefield. WASD, the arrows and the right mouse button all moved the camera before this, and none of them is what a player reaches for first. Nobody should have to hold a key down to look at the rest of their own battlefield.

The press is never consumed. It only arms the grab, and travel past a slop threshold promotes it to a pan, so every click that does not travel still reaches the card in the fan, the button on the HUD and the commander it landed on. The promotion is what calls the other readings of that press off. Touch and the pad sit this out; each already has a pan of its own. Thirty-three checks drive it through real synthetic input on a real battle, including a drag whose release never arrived.

The spells are cut paper now

The spell effects were still drawn as if on a screen: translucent shapes, line-stroke ropes, and one cardboard grade laid over the lot that turned fire mud-brown and gold the board's own khaki. Every piece of a spell now throws the lamp's shadow, fills as opaque stock, and wears the pale scissor line inside its ink contour. Alpha runs through a paper curve, so nothing solid arrives translucent. The single grade is replaced by construction-paper grading per slot, which keeps each family its colour.

That picture is a test sheet, not a battle: fifteen rings, one per spell family, laid across a mat so the grading could be checked in one frame. It is the whole point of the change, though. Under the one grade, fire came out mud and gold came out board; here each family keeps its own paper.

Three of the drawings changed with it. The smoke silhouette, which the review called "badly drawn rocks that are semi transparent", is a layered two-tone bank of cut-paper clouds. Fire is a fuse of scissor flames, orange stock with a cream heart, instead of a line-stroke rope the diorama read as a muddy branch. Lightning is one kinked paper ribbon widening toward a cut-star strike, built panel by panel. Starfall's tail is a piece of gold stock instead of a 60 percent wash that matched the board.

The Path chooser goes papercraft

The doctrine titles were the path's hue lightened onto cream, which was unreadable. They are swallowtail nameplates now, cut from the path's own stock, in the chooser and in the Compendium's Paths ledger both.

The base card stands once, in the middle, with a cut-paper arrow to each payoff, so the same face is never printed twice. The blurbs and the "Choose a doctrine" line are gone; the name alone says it. The "CURRENT" chip is a sticky note slapped on at an angle, and committing peels it off the old plate and rolls it onto the new one.

In the same room, a landed pack pick was the one thing still made of screen: the pack's colour darkened to lacquer, a lit border, the name floating in a black halo, beside empty slots that had long since become penciled frames on kraft. A filled slot is a piece of the pack's own stock now, with the name written on it in the pack's ink.

Smaller things

• Uncle Jim names the number on the road. The head-count tag beside a lane the enemy is filling is the only thing on the board that says how many bodies are marching at you, and nothing ever said so; on a first fight it read as decoration. The march's lane beat now frames each tag with its own ring, and Jim says what the number is and which one to answer first. His note about the speed row waits for a turn you can read it on, instead of arriving on top of the battle it was describing.
• A held key no longer skips Jim's lore. His walk-up was the one dialogue view in the game without the guard against key repeat, so a key still held from the fight that just ended filled the plate and took it away a few frames later. A playtester diagnosed it himself. A key repeat is not a decision.
• The daily briefing is inked for the card it is printed on. Every colour on it was chosen against the old dark panel; on kraft the pack names measured close to invisible, and a playtester said so: "I could barely read Pandemonium and not read Primordial Growth at all."
• A boss's beat-walk captions arrive as slips of the motif's own stock, settled over the lord and taken back up by the hand, instead of white type in a glowing halo drifting off like a ghost.
• The boss arrival camera holds one lane. It followed the closest pair of bodies, which flips lane to lane as they close and die.
• Grix's telegraph. The cast clock was printing across his nameplate and under his crown; it clears the sign now. The clock itself was the last HUD widget in the diorama, a rounded black panel over a lord whose sign, health ticket and body are all card; it is a slot cut in board with a strip of red paper sliding through it and the time in chalk. And his cutthroats' card says "Summon 2 Warren Shivs." and stops, because where they land is something you see a beat later. Where they land changed too: just behind one of your own bodies, the way a Backstabber's would.
• Both Masked Challengers take a turn, every round they are both alive. A pair's budget was billed as two halves but spent as one purse in one order, so the commander at the front took its whole script and the one behind lived on the change. Grix & Sift is where it showed: Grix bought goblins with three of the four points and Sift stood in the other corner with a full roster and put down two rats. Each buys its own half of the row now. The total does not move.
• Hew's plays stop being filed over Haft's empty ground. Kill Haft first and the strip of the survivor's last plays stayed parked over his patch of bare dirt.
• A tooltip answers in a third of a second, not two thirds.
• A fresh install gets XInput's deadzone, and the dice cup reads the drift-corrected stick.
• The Rapt-Boar, Gorehoof's boar that calls another out of the brush every time it kills, drops from 10 health to 5 and keeps its 3 attack. The swarm was always meant to be the threat and the single body cheap to clear; at 10 it was neither.
• Pyromancy's card backdrops are a place now. Every pack's were the same template in a recolour: a banner on a pole for the powers, a chevron ridge for the spells, two flat bands and a motif for the summons. Pyromancy's summon scene is the Burning Ward itself, with its tiered brazier, its pyre and its cauldron boiling over; the power is the same yard at its altar; the spell is the yard mid-surge. The fire is cut paper throughout, every tongue a flat ink with a hard edge and its own pale core.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 5 September 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

Cardboard Conquest takes the title screen

The menu theme is a new song, "Cardboard Conquest", written for the name. Warlords Rise, which held that spot since before the game was called this, is not retired with it. It drops into the general track pool and plays on like any other, so the shuffle still reaches it.

One knock-on you will feel before you hear the song: the boot card's sandwich bites in time with the menu theme's pulse, and the new theme is slower, 99 beats a minute against 138.5. The card holds about a second longer before it opens. A click still skips it.

Every track in the game is playable at the [jukebox](https://thepaulbooth.com/cardboard-conquest-jukebox/), which is at 77 songs now.

Uncle Jim is cut from paper

Every other face on the event screens is a cut-paper pop-up hero. Jim was a line-art cartoon squirrel-man, and he never sat right on the desk beside them. His portrait is now cut from the same stock, in a natural stance with layered sneakers instead of the turned-out feet the first cut had. The one file feeds his intro, the walk-up, the check-in, the send-off, the tutorial finale and the map's start marker, and a cutout of it is the pop-out on his card.

All fourteen costume props are re-cut in the same paper and re-pinned. The new head sits left of centre because the tail takes the right of the sheet, so every hat, every prop and every anchor was measured again rather than nudged.

His scene work moved with him:

• The finale used to cut to black and come back on the muster. It pulls back into the muster now, no black between, and the send-off stands on act 1's own land with Jim walking onto it.
• His boughs fork and breathe instead of holding still.
• His marker rings the thing it means, not the box that thing happens to fit in.
• He answers the deed you actually did, rather than the one he was still waiting for.
• His note is measured before it is put down, and it never parks on top of your hand.
• The brazier's instruction line gets its own slip of card to stand on.
• The road opens without promising to patch things up.

The relic bill comes due

Live pick data said the same thing four different ways: plus one max energy was the only decision in the relic pool. Every relic carrying it was picked 59 to 85 percent of the time no matter what was stapled to the other side. Two Curses, no gold, thirty max health, no potions: none of it was being weighed. So the bills change.

• Coronet of Rank cost two Curses and was picked 94 percent of the time. An auto-pick is not a choice. It costs four now.
• Waterlogged Satchel keeps its no-potions lock, and every potion put in front of you now costs 5 health: the shop's opening shelf, an event page for each flask its options dangle, and the belt you walk in carrying, poured out one at a time. Floored at 1 health, so it can never finish you.
• Eclipse Lens traded thirty max health. It stops anything mending you until the act ends instead.

Ascension 9 is a fight now, not a number

Ascension 9 was "max HP minus ten", which is the one shape of handicap a ladder should not have: a silent number, announced once and then never seen again.

It is the fused fight now. An ordinary battle on the road can turn out to be two commanders on one mat, both rosters, both corners, the torn-and-taped stage, both of them have to fall. It is the same fight the Masked Challengers offer, except nobody asked for it.

Ordinary battles only. Elites and bosses each lean on their own arena, their own phases and their own arrival, and fusing two of those makes a different fight rather than a harder one. The odds are a pity ladder: 10 percent on the first ordinary battle after a fused one, five points more for every battle that comes up single, and straight back to 10 the moment a pair walks out. So it is never a rung a whole march fails to show you, and never two in a row on luck alone.

Two places where being two of something read as one got fixed with it. A pair's map marker wore the Twins' split portrait, one picture cut down the middle, which says "one thing in halves"; it is a fan of two cards now, both off true. And each commander prints its own health instead of sharing one number that was the table's default twice over.

Every taunt on its own stationery

The red rubber-stamp ring is gone from the paper taunt. The pack's crest prints big in the corner of a letterhead band instead of small inside a circle over the last line, and each of the 21 packs has its own sheet: stock, ink, print and edge. Heartbreakers on pink with hearts and flowers. Draw and Order on a legal pad. Final Rites edged in mourning black. Behind You! a pale-inked note on dark stock. All 42 enemy lords have one matched to their theme too, from Rex Mortifer's runed vellum to the Kilnmaiden's crazed porcelain.

The margin ornaments then learned the sheet they are printing on. Runes on a mourning band were black on black; they step round the crest and inset past a band or a charred rim now. Slime drips stop short of the writing, wisps and cracks draw darker, Mum's stitches run the whole way round, and the wax seal tucks into the corner.

Paint on the King's Recruit and Archer

The Realm's two starting units were grey ramps dyed blue and green. They carry their own colours now: a Realm-blue tabard, steel kettle helm, plank shield and arming sword on the Recruit; a green hood and tunic, leather quiver and bracer, and a longbow at full draw on the Archer. The Ghost Archer had been sharing the Archer's drawing and keeps the old grey under its own file, because a translucent blue tint needs a grey to dye.

Elsewhere in the box: the tithe collector has his head back, and Sledge Hammarsson's mat dresses the ice around the lanes rather than under them.

Smaller things

• The aftermath page stacked its two pictures when a choice paid both a relic and a look, and it was so tall the page shrank its own words to fit: the epilogue read at 16px, the relic line at 12. They stand side by side now. Every word on that page is about 14 percent bigger, and the figure went from its 140px floor to 229.
• An event's marked-up half stopped printing in smaller type than the rest of the page.
• On a boss or elite arrival your warlord's sign was stuck down the moment the stage finished building, then hauled back out of the taunt bubble's way four seconds later. Two moves to place one sign, on the one beat that is looking at him. It waits for the fly-over to track home now and settles with his line.
• Grix's last fight was ending the round a wall-breaker unbuilt his barricades, because six fast bodies for two energy is the best card on Jim's road by a distance. That card is buried under the boss deck now, along with every id it can be wearing, so the fight teaches walls and lanes instead of ending early.
• Second Front says its piece in a ladder row's width.
• The Path's rim glows from under the banner rather than across it.
• The muster's dusk masks were deciding which side of a marker line was outside by probing, which is a coin toss on a line that wanders. It reads the winding now, and a driver samples the shipped answer on a grid fine enough to catch a dropped band two pixels tall.

These posts have a home now

Every update post since 0.5.56, twelve of them, is now readable at [pbandgames.com/devlog](https://pbandgames.com/devlog/), one page each, with an [RSS feed](https://pbandgames.com/devlog/feed.xml). They still go out here and on Steam, so nothing changes if this is where you read them.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 3 September 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

Around that: Uncle Jim starts paying attention to what you do, two commanders can share one fight, the Elder Treant turns the whole wood to autumn when he wakes, and another 93 sprites went back to the drawing board.

Where a phone's frame went

The phone build was profiled over a cable, in a real fight against the Verdant Queen, on a Pixel 10 Pro XL. Before a single soldier was on the board the game was already submitting about 1,600 draw calls a frame. Every body added 50 to 66 more. At the fight's peak of 53 bodies that was 5,468 draws, and the phone was managing 25 frames a second with the worst ones taking 181 ms.

The sim and the script explained about a quarter of that. The rest was the phone's graphics driver chewing through submissions, roughly five times slower per draw than a desktop. So the first round of fixes was about sending less:

• A body's health strip was three rectangles plus one tick per 10 HP on a commander, four to twelve drawn items apiece. It is one item now, same pixels.
• Every standee's base was four items. The disc paints its own coat and rim now, two items per body gone, diffed pixel by pixel against the old construction before it shipped.
• Damage numbers used to mint a fresh label per hit at a font size that changed with every point of damage. They come from a pool now, at five sizes.
• The battle sim runs at 30 ticks a second on phones instead of 60. That is the game's single biggest cost, halved. It is a checkbox, "Half-rate battle sim (saves battery)", under Settings, Display, Advanced, and it is off everywhere except phones and the browser.
• The die-cut edge on stand-up pieces reads the screen back once per piece, which is free on a desktop and not on a phone's tiled GPU. Off by default on phones. The difference is visible and it is good enough, which was the verdict after playing it both ways on the device.
• Highlight capture was quietly doing eight main-thread readbacks a second on phones. It defaults off there.

After that the phone was submitting about 39 draws per body, resting at around 55 fps between plays, and got through fights of 129 bodies. Above 100 bodies it still spikes, and the profile says those spikes are now mostly script, the per-body logic of a hundred and more soldiers, which is the next thing to go after.

The phone build is also smaller. Last week's build had already dropped from 1.98 GB to 344 MB and nobody mentioned it. This one is 327.5 MB: the 34 painted card cutouts leave the phone and browser builds, since neither could draw them, and the arena backdrops are capped at 2048 wide, down from 3072.

A tap reads, a drag plays

On a finger, tapping a hand card used to pick it up sticky and fly it to the side with an aiming arrow, when all you wanted was to read it. A tap now raises the card big, in place. A drag from there carries it. While you are aiming a summon or a spell, the carried card parks at whichever edge of the screen the aim is not on, so the face is not sitting over the tiles you are trying to hit.

• Android emulates a mouse, and that phantom pointer parked wherever your finger last touched. As the camera panned, whatever drifted under it hovered itself: unit cards popping open, emotes firing. The pointer now only reads the field while a finger is down.
• Pinch zooms the war map, up to 2.4x, anchored under your fingers. The chart draws about 35% larger on a phone and sits flush to the edge. A one-finger drag on it used to scroll at double speed because two systems were both reading it; a two-finger pan moved 24x as far as the fingers, which is the right ratio for a Mac trackpad and the wrong one for a phone.
• The shop's rules text rendered at about nine real pixels on a phone. Tap any ware and it steps up to the middle of the screen at native size, with the real Buy button under it.
• Picks from the hand (exhaust this, discard that) were near unusable: the first tap selected nothing and the tap on Confirm unselected the card. Fixed, and the Confirm row sits 62 px higher so a lifted card does not reach through it.
• The field ran 17% darker on phones than on the desk, because the desk lamp and one post pass are stood down there and nothing was compensating. Paid back to within 1% per channel.

The desk hit 4 fps, and the game learned to shed

A screenshot came in from a crowd fight against the Fear Drinker: 333 ms a frame, 8,443 draws, two hundred-odd bodies carpeted in floating "Fear" words. The obvious suspects were the words and the Fear mechanic. A probe stood the same fight up at 216 bodies and switched things off one at a time, and neither of those was it. Rendering was 12 ms of the frame.

The tick did not fit. At 220 bodies a physics tick costs about 7.4 ms, and at 60 ticks a second the sim owed 442 ms of work every second, so the engine's catch-up clamp ran its full eight steps every frame and the game spiralled down to about 7 fps. The same field at 30 ticks a second measured 28.8 ms against 143.5.

So the battle now sheds. There is a ladder with three rungs above normal, climbed off a running average of frame time. It climbs in under half a second and steps down only after three seconds of real headroom, so it cannot flap.

• Rung one: floating status words ride a field-wide budget, and the ambient effects thin.
• Rung two: the sim drops to 30 ticks. Walk-bobs freeze. Projectiles fly invisibly but land on the same clock. Damage numbers go small. New pieces skip the die-cut blade.
• Rung three: all words and every damage number except your own commander's.

Everything on the ladder is cosmetic apart from the tick rate, and 30 is the rate a phone already runs at all the time. Outcomes, co-op streams and replays are identical at every level. If you chose 30 yourself in Settings, the ladder never overrides you upward.

The round boundary stops hitching

A card face is about 90 nodes and takes about 11 ms to build, which on its own is most of a frame. The enemy's play strip and the spell telegraph were each building one per play, all in the same frame at the round boundary, which is exactly where the lag reports pointed. Faces are booked into a queue now and built one per frame; a play arrives as its token first and dissolves into the face a frame or three later, while the holder is still sliding in. Above 1x speed the strip does not build faces at all until you point at one, which removes the round-boundary spike outright at the default 2x. The opening deal is built while the board is still assembling, so the first "Your Turn" went from five 25 to 33 ms frames to the banner's own one.

The frame readout in the screenshot above is a new switch, "Show performance stats", under Settings, Game, Advanced. Change something mid-fight and watch the number move. The Display page's frame-rate knobs (vsync, the fps cap, the desk lamp, the half-rate sim, floating numbers) folded away under their own Advanced header, because that page had grown tall enough to push the Close button off a 1080 screen.

A Mac crashed the moment a boss died

A player on an Intel MacBook Pro crashed the instant he beat Rusty, one battle in. The highlight reel was reading the GPU back from inside the renderer's own draw, and on that platform the read stalled every frame in flight and re-entered a callback that was already running. The composite waits a frame now, the capture gate closes while it runs, and the Mac takes the safe readback path. The GIF encoder turned out to be throwing away its colour cache every frame as well; the output is byte-identical, it just stops doing that.

Uncle Jim watches what you do

The guided march was a lecture. Every offer had one right answer and the other two were dealt face up and refused on press. Jim keeps a memory of the march now: what you actually took at each offer, how often that was not what he suggested, and which remarks he has already spent. Every suggestion is a suggestion. Go your own way three times and he says he has noticed, once. The campfire's forge steers onto the card you really took at the first fight. Play a spell where he asked for a soldier and he tells you what a spell is and lets the ask stand. The fire is an ordinary fire, with Rest switched on and its real number, and Jim mends you himself on the way in.

The acorn is a thing. Grix carries it through the boss fight, hung on his body so it heaves with him, and when he goes down it flies the length of the arena into your commander's hand. The send-off page is Jim's own event page, in his woods, and he hands it back. His woods got a dusk sky and a near tree.

Between acts he reads the act's own ledger: the longest scrap, the one-round door-slam, the fight that left the mark. And he has 124 new lines, drawn from a written history of every kingdom and grudge in the bestiary, one snippet per lord, told in whatever costume he happens to be wearing.

Two commanders, one fight

The Masked Challengers is an event that fuses any two ordinary commanders into one battle. They take the two far corners, the roads are dealt by half, each lays its own signature ground on its own roads only, and the stage is visibly torn and taped together from both their arenas. The pair spends four energy a round between them while both stand. Kill one and the fight goes on: the survivor's own book replaces the fused one, with none of the fallen's cards, spells or pressure, and the energy drops back to three.

Events that pay in their own coin

The Brass Pilgrim chain got its own currency. The puzzle in beat one hands over the Cold Star Splinter. The message in beat two comes with the Letter to Halav and the Dead King's Due, a borderless curse that costs 1 and rides every shuffle to the top of your deck, which is the counter the Letter needed now that the Letter pays once a round. The great lantern at the end opens only for whoever still carries all three, so scrubbing the curse at a campfire is a choice with a price. The orrery is timed now, and it turns under a finger.

The Toll used to be a purse you looted. It is Brother Clang's toll now: a Toll Collector musters at his back line in every lane and walks the whole board at your crown, and each one that reaches it takes 5 gold. A lane you are holding kills its own collector; the bill is written by how many you let walk.

The Vivisectionist's two questions, which used to be four coloured slips on a tinted heading, are an event page with a story on it. The menu changed under it: Bone Plating gives Armor 2, Adrenal Graft brings Pounce in with the Charge, Grafted Longarms says what it does instead of quoting reach numbers, Lumbering Gait cuts movement to a quarter, and Necrotic Graft takes Sluggish Reflexes' place on the menu and starts the patient rotting.

• Gaining a Curse deals one of nine now, five of them new: Hesitation, Personal Demons, Bad Counsel, Moths and Pound of Flesh. The deal is seeded, so quitting and reloading hands you the same curse.
• The Sealed Lot's sale room is cut from card: a wax-sealed lot under a bell jar, a paper-doll rival who raises a manila paddle, a kraft gavel. Every word a minigame says is cut from card now instead of typed in light over the board, and a game you played at a table can be one of your three highlight clips.
• Hand the Black Company captain the whole purse and the aftermath page pays out a common relic the option never promised. The Golden Road's two-relic market costs 250, not 150. The seer's 30 gold fee is printed on the row instead of hidden inside both outcomes.
• The Daily March deals a warlord. One shuffled cycle of nine days, each warlord once, on loan whether or not you have opened them.

The Elder Treant

When his last stand puts him up in his amber-leaved woken form, the arena follows him: a front spreads out of his post across the mat, up the backdrop and through every standing green, and the swamp is an autumn wood from that frame on. His Earthquake is no longer a disc of card dropped on the aim point. A ragged mouth opens at the epicentre and a heave of thrown-up earth runs the length of the lane in both directions, because that is what the spell does. He is felled with an axe, one overhead, and the trunk comes apart in two halves with a pale round of heartwood showing.

Every boss phase break used to be a white-out with a new body behind it. It is three beats now: the old form locks up and swells, comes apart in pieces cut from its own art, and the new one climbs onto the same feet through the debris, printed flat in ink first and resolving to the real art as it plants.

The Cursemonger's silencing miasma pools in every lane rather than one random band, so every lane has a place to hold a kill until the wisp is standing in the hush. The Twins' bestiary page tells you what killing one twin does, which was the entire elite check and was written nowhere. Phoenix Plume asks one thing before it heals: that the enemy commander lost health this round.

Cards and relics

• World Tree trades Spearwall 8 for Rootreach 5: every five seconds a strand of root runs down its own lane and the first enemy it reaches takes 5. Reach the crown and it bills the crown.
• Mount Up mints 9/2 light cavalry instead of handing every caught ally the 14/5 Cavalry body. Bannerman's upgrade is Free Deploy, at Shield 8.
• Sunder costs 1. Palimpsest costs 2 and upgrades to 1 rather than to free. Quarantine is Large and stays in the deck. Spider Hatcher is Rare, Exhausts, and lays every 2 seconds instead of every 1. A Leech summons one; the upgrade brings two.
• Madness stacks its seconds. Contagion carries every harmful status the corpse was wearing, and leaps 600 px. Break Ground's badge counts the terrain it lifts, and a spade is driven down the road when you play it.
• Barrel Toss leaves Giantkind for The Wasting as Rot Bloom: a puffball that swells as it creeps, hits only enemies, and carries five charges.
• The keyword on the Ghost card is called Ethereal, because a Wraith reading "Ghost, Lifesteal, and Overheal" was read as the thing it summons.
• Gravekeeper's Bell heals 1 and costs 20 max HP. Sexton's Shears cut the whole removal fee. First Mate Polly lines every road with an archer. The Devil's Doubloon no longer halves your purse; it curses the pocket, and gold stops sticking to you for the rest of the run.

The stone under every lord is a portrait

Each enemy card carries its lord's origin stone in the bottom diamond, and until this week most of those were a badge: a skull, a snowflake, a ring with a glyph in it. They were drawn twice. First as busts to their faction's style card, then again once the rule became that the stone is a portrait of the rig you actually fight, so Rusty's stone grins like Rusty and the Fire Devil's is the red imp with the flame crest that walks onto the board.

The same review loop that redrew 594 sprites last week kept going. The eleven generic enemy bodies that had been borrowing the player's faces (the Warlord, the Ogre, the Commander, the Shaman and the rest) are their own grey-green host now, drawn to an enemy sheet. The fifteen act-3 lord sprites of the Dread Court, Perihelion, Rex Mortifer and the Avatar of Winter went through two blind judge rounds. The three archers stopped sharing one pose.

Sixteen potion icons were redrawn. Eleven of them had been a picture of a bottle stamped onto the bulb of a drawn bottle, and five borrowed a keyword glyph that belongs to every card with that keyword. Each draws what the drink does now.

Sound

Twenty archers were twenty full-volume copies of one bowstring, 45 ms apart. There is a voice cap per family now, and each voice already sounding pulls the next one down, so a volley sums to about one shot loud. And a shot sounds like what it throws: a crossbow clacks, a slinger whips, a spitter spits, a caster hums, a launcher's lob thuds, instead of every one of them twanging a longbow.

Songs are blended on two decks, the way a DJ hands one over. Every crossfade used to be a dip through near-silence, so the track-to-track blend is 4 seconds now and a boss theme cutting in is 3.

Controller

A slip of card sits above End Turn whenever a pad is driving, wearing the glyph of whatever button opens Inspect mode. It was the one battle control a pad player could not find by pressing things. Nothing is selected while the armies are still taking the field; the ring used to land on a potion for the whole muster. And a tired stick's drift is measured and subtracted, per device and per stick, so a pad on the desk stops steering the pointer by itself.

A letter back

If you have sent a report through the quill and a build you are now running did something about it, the title screen opens one sheet of vellum addressed to you by name, quoting your words, listing what changed because of them, and signed. Nobody phones home for this who has not written in or does not already share telemetry, and "Letters from the developer" in Settings switches it off.

Smaller things

• Right-click drops the flask you are carrying, and the camera no longer eats that click.
• Ticking "View upgrades" at the forge stops blanking the grid and refilling it card by card.
• High Ground in Act 0 sometimes drew as a see-through slab: the knife was closing a ring with a 2 px stub that crossed itself, 11 placements in 675. Solid now.
• The wrecking ball's wall comes down when the ball reaches it. It used to fall the frame the flask was drunk.
• A spent summoning spot takes its dotted feed line with it. A first launch is never asked to wishlist.
• The emote wheel is cut from construction paper. Every nameplate is a sticker rolled onto the board. The village sundial stands up off the plate again, so Wally's clock works. The Frozen Throne on the chart is a throne of hewn ice now; it used to read as a heart-rate line.

In the browser and on the phone

Both are on this build, alongside Windows, Mac and Linux. Everything in the performance sections above reaches the browser too, and the half-rate sim is on by default there as well. The one visible loss on those two platforms is Uncle Jim's painted arrival, which is one of the 34 paintings that no longer ship there.

The soundtrack is still free to listen to at thepaulbooth.com/cardboard-conquest-jukebox.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 2 September 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

594 pieces, and not one landed first time

There are 686 unit sprites in the game. 594 were redrawn for this build.

Each one started again from the block-in, drawn against its faction's card, then handed to a reviewer who had never seen it and could only look at the render, never the file. Whatever that reviewer named got fixed, and most pieces went round again after that. Forty of those judgements are written down.

The faults it kept naming were the same short list:

• Parts set next to each other instead of overlapping, so a hand rested against a spear shaft rather than closing on it.
• Legs made of rounded bars with no knee in them, four of them identical.
• Eyes drawn as a circle inside a circle.
• A beak standing beside a head instead of growing out of it.
• Outlines doing the fill's job, so anything thin (horns, tails, two whole faces) collapsed into a black lump.

Some were further off than that. The Carrion Court's vulture was a penguin. The Trojan Horse's head was a rocket nose with a loose triangle balanced on top. The Hellfire pack was a brown smear with eight legs in it. The Instar line was eight drawings of the same crab, and is an actual evolution now.

Left to right, one row per unit. The leftmost cell is the drawing that was in the last build; everything right of it happened since.

On the board, at the size you actually see them:

Every enemy lord has its own sign

The nameplate over an enemy commander was one torn strip of card in forty different tints with a family ornament glued on, which made the whole roster read as one enemy in costumes. Every lord in the catalogue now gets a sign built for it, with its own silhouette, construction and handwriting.

Grix hangs a bitten trophy shield. The Slime Lord's sign is the puddle. Rex Mortifer is a femur with the ledger rule closed over it. The Dread Court sends a black gilt-deckled summons in pale ink. Perihelion keeps its paper orbit ring.

Nothing on the desk is lettered on the desk

A handful of things were still plain text floating on the cutting mat, and once the rest of the game was cut from card they stood out badly.

The note under a relic hover ("Click to see all 9 relics") is on paper now instead of haloed lettering under a forged cartouche. Hovering an event option shows the card or relic it names without a caption above it telling you what the row already told you. The act boss's name on the chart is the nameplate he wears in battle, stood in the band under his feet, rather than a line of UI type between two invented diamonds. The last rounded button on the desk is cut from manila.

The backdrops were washed out, and it was the printing

Four screenshots came in of arenas that looked bleached, and the cause was in the press.

A cut backdrop ships with its sky punched out, and the press worked out its exposure from the average of the whole sheet. It counted the punched hole as black ink, decided a third of the picture was solid black, and cranked the lift up to compensate for a picture that was not there. All 26 cut plates were running between 2.2 and 4.0 times too bright. Everything above the midpoint clipped to white and took the colour with it.

The average measures ink now, and never a hole. Those same plates land between 0.71 and 1.9.

Act 0

The tutorial is an act, and it belongs to Uncle Jim.

You meet him before you see a map. He runs on, says hello, and asks which pack you fancy in his own words rather than by name. The one you pick is handed over on screen, its piece snapped onto your commander's head and its starter flown into the deck, before Sift turns up and throws in the other two. The chart says "Act 0, Jim's Woods" and walks itself onto the first marker, so you are not staring at a road wondering what to press.

Jim's Woods used to reuse the act 1 drawing; it has its own stretch of the Verdant Reach now. Grix has his own landmark at the head of the sheet: a warren gate thrown up out of whatever the horde could drag, in place of the oak he used to borrow. When he falls the act gets a real ending, the same seal and page-tear that act 1 gets on the way to act 2.

Moments of the March

When a run ends, the summary offers three clips of it.

They are picked from what happened: a last stand, a chain reaction, an army at full size, an overkill, the blow that finished a boss, the fight you lost. Each is a real recording, titled, with a share button that puts the clip and a line of text onto your clipboard. Compendium records keep them, so you can reopen a reel from a run you finished days ago.

Losing looks like losing

Your warlord used to fall by folding forward at the waist with his legs left standing bolt upright underneath, and then vanishing. It read as a stumble.

It is six staged beats now: the blow, the stagger, the knee, a half second where he tries to get up and does not, the fall itself turning about the soles like a piece of board going over, and the landing. The camera and the sound go with it. The names that used to be typeset over the last frame of the run are gone, because they captioned something you had just watched happen.

The balance desk is empty

The balance desk had 109 open calls on it. Every one is resolved.

The ones you will feel first are the enemy commander spells that had no answer. Throneflame is gone: burn on a large ring at your crown was six damage no guard caught and no positioning avoided. Vulture's Due counted the whole graveyard, so a long fight armed it forever whatever you did; it stoops on fresh kill now, one knife per unit of yours lost in the last ten seconds, and its telegraph prints the live number. The Roots Reach was a ring at the crown and is now what its name says, one strand down every lane, stopped by the first body it meets.

On your side, Dissolving Rain pours Poison 5 instead of 2, Fan of Knives cuts Bleed 5 across a large area, and Break Ground sweeps a large area and lifts everything in it, including the terrain that was clipped by the edge of your aim and used to survive. An upgraded Brother and Sister Slime fuse into an upgraded Slimebling. Shield Sworn drops its printed armor and keeps Pack Tactics, so there is one armor number on it instead of two arguing.

Smaller things

• Every terrain name is a term you can hover, tinted like the status it behaves as, so a card can say "Creates 1 Smouldering Cinders" and the hover tells you what standing there costs.
• Hovering a unit that is immune to Poison no longer raises a Poison panel explaining a status it cannot take.
• The letter E reaches the Compendium's search box again. The map was claiming that key for the ink eraser and eating it under every overlay, which is why the search box looked broken with a run in progress and fine from the main menu.
• The cut edge has a width, so the knife stops leaving whiskers, and a slot finer than the blade gets board put back in it.
• Redeploy lands as one piece, in the shape it left in.

In the browser and on the phone

Both are on this build, alongside Windows, Mac, Linux and the demo.

The soundtrack is still free to listen to at thepaulbooth.com/cardboard-conquest-jukebox.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 31 August 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

The arenas

Every enemy commander now fights on a stage built for them — backdrop, mat, and the standing pieces in between. Thirty-nine were redrawn for this release; the other three landed just before it.

The Frozen Harbour has real longships and a red lighthouse, with a fish frozen in its block. Grave Tide's great wreck reads as a ship now: the ribs have a keel and the anchor is shaped like an anchor. The Bone Throne is actually a throne — ribs, vertebrae, a crowned skull. The Razed Village burns properly, house-shaped shells and a church skeleton over an ash-dressed mat. The Luggage Graveyard got a monument: one colossal open steamer trunk.

A few of them move. The Elder Treant's ground grows a tree from seed to crown and back to seed, and the loop closes on itself — the last frame is the first frame, the same seed lying in the same spot. Verdy B. Queen's hive grows a course taller and wider for every three of her swarm still standing, so you can read how the fight is going off the wall behind her. Wind crosses her meadow as a travelling swell rather than every blade nodding on its own timer.

Wally's moon rises through clear sky now, too. It used to set behind a tree.

Icons

Four hundred and eighty-five icons were redrawn.

The old set leaned on symbols where it should have drawn the thing: motion dashes for movement speed, a flask and some plus signs for a growth serum, circular arrows for a shuffle. They are a boot, a syringe and a die now.

Three hundred and fifty-four of them used to be several disconnected islands of ink. None are now — every icon is a single silhouette that a blade could punch out in one piece, which is the whole idea.

The browser and the phone

The web build was rough, and the reason turned out not to be what anyone assumed.

The frame is bound by how many things are drawn, not how many pixels they cover. Hiding the painted layers on each piece's cardboard stand saves about a quarter of the frame; shrinking those same layers to a fiftieth of their size saves nothing at all. The stands were costing more than the soldiers standing on them.

So: the die-cut edge now walks a number of steps matched to how big the cut actually is on screen — a small standee no longer pays for a blade it never shows — and the browser and Android builds stand their lights down, drop a full-screen pass, and stop drawing at twice the resolution on high-density displays. Icons ship with mipmaps where they are drawn far smaller than they were authored, which makes them both sharper and lighter in memory.

Wally has a song

Every boss had a theme except one. Wally's arrives with the fight now — sunny radio pop that tears into something with teeth at each moonrise and then pulls itself back together, which is the honest summary of Wally.

It is on the jukebox with everything else: thepaulbooth.com/cardboard-conquest-jukebox

The Instar line

Instar I through VIII was eight variations on a green crab. It is a real progression now: one new feature per molt, in an order that means something — the outsized right claw, then the shell plates, then the matching left, the tail, the head, the blade, and finally the crown. The keel laid down at the third molt is what splits open at the eighth.

The flavour text reads as one story across the eight cards, counted in the shells it leaves behind. Instar VIII gets the pop-out cutout, because by then it has earned it.

Those cards also speak the other nine languages now. Instar II through VIII had always shipped in English no matter what you had selected — the translation pass never followed a card into what it hatches into. Thirteen links like that were found and fixed, so summoned units, death-spawns, trap pieces and polymorph targets all carry their names and flavour into every language.

Fixes

• Every sheet in the cardboard stack shows its cut edge again. A ply could lose its corrugation entirely and read as a flat coloured shape, and the strips could break into offset segments around curves. Two of six arenas were affected before the fix.
• A unit that grows now stands on a stand that grew with it. Growth-fed bodies were overhanging discs at about two-thirds the size they should have been.
• A card previewing another card draws its pop-out properly. Anything shown as a referenced card — what a unit hatches into, what a trap springs, what a spell summons — drew its art shrunk inside the frame instead of cut out and standing off it. The controller focus ring traces the cutout now.
• Wally's transformation swaps cleanly. Both names could show at once, with the new one adrift beside his head.
• The telegraph column and the recent-plays record now follow their commander instead of sitting where the board says they should — on some stages that was a third of a screen out for the whole fight.
• Arc Coil zaps for 3. Cover of Night prints its keyword rather than its rulebook. Silvertongue is a snake again.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 28 August 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

Your saves came with you. Profiles, runs and unlocks all carried across on the first boot, demo included.

The same fight, both ways

This is the same battle, the same round, the same hand, shot twice. Left is what the game looked like a fortnight ago. Right is what it looks like now.

Nothing here is a filter. Every piece on the board was rebuilt as an object: die-cut edges that show their corrugation, one shadow per piece because there is one lamp, each standee leaning a little because nothing hand-cut stands perfectly straight. Allegiance rings and glowing outlines are gone. The stands are painted by side instead, the way you would paint your own.

Each fight builds its arena in front of you rather than fading one in. A bare box, then a torn construction-paper ground sheet in the arena's colour, then the roads paint on, then the cut-paper props drop in a wave. Every arena is dressed from its own theme, with a signature corner for the lord you are fighting.

Every screen came off the screen and onto the desk

The menu, the campfire, the shop, the chest reveal, the map, the spoils, the run summary, the compendium, the act transitions and the coronation all moved onto the same lit desk.

Cards are printed on card stock and hand-cut, so two Recruits in your hand are two separate cuts of the same card. Costs became pieces you could pick up. Keywords print in burnt ochre instead of glowing.

All 124 events are pop-up spreads now. The page creases, turns, and the pieces stand up out of the fold.

The menu wordmark is the game's name cut from corrugated board with a strip of masking tape across the O. The icon is a hand-cut crown on crimson paper. And the store capsule finally shows the game you actually play.

One more thing worth saying plainly: the three Realistic art-style boxes are gone from Settings. There is one look now, and the painted set is retired rather than deleted.

Ten warlords, and you open them by doing things

Five new commanders, ten in total. Boxer doubles melee and halves ranged. Pirate drafts a fourth pack. Witch pours every potion twice. Viking doubles the attack of anything already wounded. Ninja summons anywhere on the field. Each brings a seven-card starter deck, its own rig, field sprites, card art, a signature relic and a hand-drawn lair.

None of them is behind a win ladder. Every warlord posts a writ: a countable deed that any march can satisfy, win or lose. Do the deed and they take up arms.

Wally, the Neighborly

A new act 1 boss whose fight is the sky. The sun crosses in two rounds, and at moonrise the whole village turns: a dull villager deck by day, a vicious wolf book by night, every body mapping one to one and carrying its wounds through the change. There are two ways to finish him, because there are two of him.

More to walk into

• The guided march. A first run on an authored six-node road with a pinned seed, offered once on a profile's first New Game and replayable from Settings whenever you want it.
• The Wandering Bazaar. An event merchant stocking cards from packs this run never drafted, plus relic and flask shelves that exist in no other pool.
• Witches' Brew. Mints one of twenty-one potions from a shelf only the Witch reaches.
• Two minigames got real rules. The pachinko board is played rather than pre-rolled: slide the ball along a rail, let go where you like, and a real simulation carries it through the pins. The herald's sigil sequence grows by one call a round.
• 89 distinct arena gags across the arenas, one animation each, instead of a shared fading circle.
• Two packs were renamed. Rogue's Gambit is now Behind You! and Traps and Tricks is Trapper's Delight. Your saved pack XP, looks and emote lines are untouched.

The bosses fight wide

• Rex Mortifer was re-cut around a tide. Bonewalker is 1 HP, 2 attack, Undying 2, four to a play.
• The Mimic duplicates your line instead of warping it. Blanks muster five 2/5 bodies rather than two 4/10.
• The Dread Court trades one big diver for three cheap birds, and doubles its snipers.
• The Hushmaidens became a crowd. Quietus lands long Stuns and Silences off one small cast, and Every Word Unsaid bills you per silenced unit.
• The Frost Yeti throws your soldiers back down the road and drops Ball Lightnings that roll at your commander.
• Event Horizon folds your army into a knot and drops Starfall on it.

Every boss now opens its phase with its own object, twenty-one hand-drawn props between them, and all 42 enemy commanders got a resting beat.

Rules that were quietly wrong

• Fragile banks hits instead of multiplying them. Each Fragile doubles the blow and spends one stack, so Fragile 2 is two doubled hits and not one tripled one. Two stacks used to turn 5 damage into 15.
• Momentum raises the ceiling once, not once a turn. A single copy used to pay +1, then +2, then +3, compounding all battle.
• Stun adds up. Stun 1 onto a body with 3 seconds left leaves 4. It used to keep the longer and throw the other away.
• Repeating shield relics only cover unshielded units. Champion's Laurels was re-walling the whole army every round.
• A curse is not a spell. A free Decay no longer cashes spell relics, feeds Channeling or arms the Mimic's echo.
• Each warlord has their own commander health, priced against their signature relic, instead of a shared flat 110.
• Formation folded into Pack Tactics, which no longer reads unit kind. Auto End Turn is on by default for anyone who never opened Settings.

Co-op sees the whole game now

• The whole party watches the fight begin. The establishing shot, the roads painting in and the scenery falling into place were all refused in co-op, so a party had never once seen a battle assemble.
• Boss arrivals play for everyone. The fly-over, the nameplate slam, the taunt and your warlord's answer were solo-only. Barks are rolled once by the host and shipped, so both seats hear the same sentence.
• A party wipe gets the same last look a solo death gets: a frozen, inspectable board and the ledger of what killed you.
• A joiner sees the thing hitting its army rather than the aftermath: chain and fork arcs, Bombard shells, Contagion jumps, a Tank stepping in front of a blow.
• Four things that freeze a fight now stop it for the whole table instead of one seat: the settings menu, the Steam overlay, an unplugged pad and the feedback form. The banner says who stopped the board.

Controller, Steam Deck and touch

On a Steam Deck every mouse event is now treated as a deliberate hand, so the desktop's pad-echo guards and steering discount turn off and a thumb resting on a trigger no longer eats a tap. A finger on the glass takes the screen on every platform. Single-target aims snap to the nearest legal body. On phones the settings page, all nine compendium pages, the relic grid and the run summary can be dragged by their widgets.

A full board is back inside a frame

The heaviest fights were running at nearly twice a frame's budget and are now comfortably inside it. Per simulation tick, at 287 bodies: 19.86ms down to 8.71ms. At 220 bodies: 14.48 down to 7.36. At 140: 7.63 down to 5.09. Co-op snapshots fit inside a single packet again, and a card plate is cut once rather than sixty times a second, which is what used to make panels shake.

Fixes

• A commander's health bar drew underneath any body standing in front of it.
• Bodies could get stuck in a fold of the road on layouts that double back.
• "Regen 0" and "Growth: +0 HP" printed on bodies you could watch healing.
• The spell aim line painted across the card you had lifted to read.
• Gravity Wells could not find down on a road running up the screen.
• Landing on Bust on the Double Down wheel played the treasure fanfare.
• Dragging a potion out of the belt moved nothing on screen.
• Polymorph Scroll now shows you the two cards it rewrote.
• A boss phase break could freeze the game with no way out.

Every reworded card, keyword and screen went out in all ten languages, Wally and the Rex Mortifer re-cut included.

In the browser

The browser build is still 0.6.2, and it still shows the old look. Downloading the Windows, macOS or Linux build is the only way to see any of the above today.

The reason is size. itch will not process a browser upload that holds any single file over 200 MB, and the game packed for the web now comes to 662 MB, three quarters of it the papercraft art itself. Shipping one art style instead of two was supposed to solve this and did not, because a die-cut standee carries more pixels than the flat plate it replaced. The browser version needs the art on a real diet before it can go up, and that is the next job rather than a promise.

Cardboard Conquest is 871 cards, 21 packs, 10 warlords, 42 enemy lords, 7 bosses, 124 events, 275 relics, 33 potions, 79 achievements and 74 tracks, solo or in online co-op for up to four. Wishlist it and you will hear the moment the crown is up for grabs.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 27 August 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

Version 0.6.1 leads with a rule change: spells cannot touch a commander any more. They are a weapon against the army again. Behind it are a new three-part event chain, an upgrade preview on every card in the game, a camera that actually watches the fight, and another round of paint.

Spells fight the army

Aiming every spell at the enemy lord's face had become the way to win. The commander's health bar was simply the shortest road to the end of a fight, so the army standing in between stopped mattering. Commanders are now immune to spells, on both sides, through every path a spell had to reach one: single-target aim, the pad's target ring, area effects, whole-field sweeps and chain forks.

Long Odds is the one door back in, and it is priced like one. Two energy and a card for 5 damage aimed at the enemy commander and nothing else. It exhausts either way, so a miss costs you the card. Land the finish and the run keeps +3 max HP for the rest of the march. It houses in the Rogue's Gambit pack beside Coup de Grace.

Right-click any card to see its upgrade

Hold the right mouse button over an upgradable card and the upgraded face lays itself over the one you are pointing at: the "+" name, the greened numbers, the added keyword and its definition panel. Release and it drops. It is the campfire's before-and-after read, available everywhere a card is shown: your hand, the draft, the shop, the deck list, the reward pick.

The Brass Pilgrim

The events have a chain again, in three parts. A brass envoy three hundred years out of the salt with its lantern knocked crooked, the word it is still carrying, and the twelve-strong embassy that finally catches you up.

Chains no longer take their chances against the whole event pool: once you have met the first beat, the next one jumps the queue at the next event node you walk into, and the panel prints the chapter mark under the title. Two of the three beats are played on the lantern itself, a new minigame of nested brass rings where turning any ring carries every ring inside it, and the harder ring comes last.

The camera watches the fight

The deploy frame reserves room for a hand that tucks itself away the moment the fighting starts, which parked about 30% of the screen on empty ground and drew your units around 50 pixels tall. While the fan is tucked, the camera now re-centres the fight in the space the HUD actually leaves it, and a sustained brawl earns a push-in that tracks the scrum and eases back out as the heat cools. Your own pan or zoom stands the whole thing down, and Reduce Motion never sees it.

Every boss now gets the fly-over, not just the ones on wide fields, centred on the lord with its beats lined up against the taunts. The wide boss field is gone; each boss has a lane layout cut for it instead.

New paint

• Twenty-three spells got bespoke scenes. These were the last cards still wearing icon blow-ups from the June generation, thin symbolic sketches in an older language than the rest of the set. Slimify, Big Bang, Thunderclap, Exhume, Dark Pact and eighteen more now have their own painted faces.
• The slime pack lives in a slime world. The pack and the Slime Lord's own cards were rebuilt as full scenes with tide depth and colour accents, and the pack's power and spell cards moved in with them.
• The barricades are buildings. The Barricade is a rickety wall with real windows and the Spiked Barricade got the gappy pass its plain cousin already had. Both are ghosted to 55%, so a fight behind one is still a fight you can watch.
• Fifteen boon keepsakes were redrawn as the things they are, and the potion icons now sit inside the glass.
• Pharaoh's Curse is the mask that breathes the plague. The Spearman is a man braced behind a planted spear.
• A Growth unit visibly outgrows its own art, and its allegiance ring and shadow grow with the body instead of staying pinned to the size it was drawn at.
• The hive bugs got cute, and every adaptation now grows out of the body rather than floating beside it.

The road

• Every act now has exactly two merchants, one early and one late. A merchant used to be a weighted node type like any other, and that lottery left 61% of the paths you could actually walk past no merchant at all, with most of the ones that did appear crowded into the top four rows. Gold earned in the back half of an act had nowhere to go. Merchants are now placed after the map is rolled, weighted toward the nodes that the most root-to-boss paths run through. Paths carrying at least one merchant go from 39.0% to 61.4%.
• Only an act's first fight draws from the weak roster. A route can hold as few as two normal fights now, so a three-fight weak window meant plenty of runs never met the strong roster at all.
• The won-battle heal relics actually pay out. Triumphal Litter, Surgeon's Tent, Winter Stores, Camp Followers and Bounce Back all mended the run sheet and were then wiped a beat later when the run's health was re-pinned to the commander's body. The mend now goes onto the body, which is the thing that moves the bar, and the spoils screen replays it on the top bar.

Numbers

• The Elder Treant's Earthquake deals 3, down from 8.
• Big Bang splits the whole army at a point of health each.
• Slimify is a small area for 1 energy. Chrysalis seals a small area and molts 50% bigger. Reassemble aims at a medium area instead of one ally.
• The Gravity Wells are 0.75x heavy and 1.5x light.
• The Whispering Shelf's upgrade is Free Deploy.
• A full board still takes a summon, and the spawners hold rather than losing the body.

The run reads back to you

The end-of-run tally used to be nine stat plaques spilling onto a ragged second line, headed by a citation that could show a bare card name. It is one plate now: your favourite card wearing its real face, upgraded if that is the copy you played, the count beside it, and four headline numbers past a gilt divider. Click the face and the full-size card opens. The cut rows survive as honours instead. The unlock recap also waits for the parade to finish showing you each thing before it restates them, and only cards played from hand count toward your most-played.

Words

Cards now distinguish "allies" from "your units", and say which one they mean. An ally is any friendly body on the field; your units are the ones you deployed. In a solo run they are the same thing, which is exactly why it was easy to leave vague. In co-op they are not, and a card that heals allies does something quite different from one that heals your units.

In the browser

The browser build is current again. It ships one art style rather than two, because two sets of art do not fit under the embed's size ceiling, so the three Realistic boxes are not in its Settings. What it carries is what the game's own defaults resolve to: cartoon cards, painted scenes, cartoon arenas. Switching styles needs one of the Windows, Linux or Mac builds.

Smaller things

The battle camera can get closer than 2x. Auto-play holds to the battle and nothing else. The walkthrough runs backwards as well as forwards. A normal fight keeps the song that walked in with you. Mini Me's unlock card is dressed in your own commander. A blitz that took exactly one round says "1 round". The top bar counts a Leg, not a March. The Regicide's card burns on screen before the verdict lands. A commander that never flanks says so instead of reporting "Flanker-happy: 0%". Card art that fails to load no longer takes the card's frame down with it.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 12 August 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

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, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

A battle used to begin with a loading screen: a column marching under a studio logo while the arena was generated somewhere out of sight. Now the field builds itself where you can watch it. Roads paint in, scenery drops onto its spots, the commanders take their ground, and the interface slides in from the edges. The wait is the same length. It just stopped being a wait.

The battle assembles itself

• The loading screen is gone from solo battles. The map fades through black while the arena generates, then the stage builds on camera: roads paint in left to right, scenery lands in a travelling wave, terrain bands bloom from their centres, muster tiles pop, and the commanders take the field before the HUD slides in from its edges.
• Any click or key skips straight to the finished field, and reduce-motion gets plain fades instead.
• The studio logo plays at boot only. Branding in the middle of a run reads as an ad break. A battle load gets its own picture now: your host crossing the region ridges toward the field, under a horizon tinted for the act you are in.

Fights open at speed

• The speed dial defaults to 2x. A round measures 6.6 seconds against the old 12.6. It was already the biggest pacing lever in the game and it opened on its slowest notch for everyone who never went looking for it. If you have picked a speed yourself, you keep it.
• The boss tax came down. Three bosses were taking 37% of a run's fight time across 3 of its 15 fights. Every boss bar comes down, weighted by how often that boss is actually beaten, the Swamp Treant hardest.
• Act 1 was the slowest act, which is the opposite of how it feels: 3.6 rounds a fight against Act 3's 2.0. A starter deck is the weakest thing that ever fights, so the grind sat in the run's first twenty minutes. Act 1's bars come down to meet its decks.
• The boss fly-over is half the length it was. The finishing blow is not scaled at all, because a lord's arrival and its death are the moments the fight is for.

Three events you play instead of read

• The Charmwright designs a relic to your order. She replaces the Whispering Grove, and she does not sell what she has: you tell her what the charm should do, what it should take, and how you are paying. Eighty gold, fifteen percent of your health into the quench, or a flask on the coals. Then two strikes, one of three boons and one of three flaws. Every pairing is a real relic with a real name, and nothing on that anvil is free.
• The Travelling Medic bottles a card. Her third row is the only place in the run that turns a card into a flask. Pick anything playable out of your deck; it leaves the deck for good and you walk away carrying a Potion of it. Uncorking that flask plays the card three times over, free, one copy after another.
• The Mirror Vault's twins arrive on screen. Doubling your deck used to be a line of text. Now a copy of every card you carry fades up somewhere on the page, one after another, until the pile has buried the screen, and only then does it drain into the deck a card at a time. Its curse has a name now: Mirror's Due.

Forbidden Lore learns to burn

• Erasure spends as many pages as you choose. It was a flat blast that took one page afterwards. Now the pages are the spell: aim the circle, burn any number of cards out of your hand, and the whole total lands as one blow on everything inside it.
• Speak the Name replaces Angle Hounds. It lands one Charm per page burned this battle, counting the page it burns to be spoken, so it can never resolve on nothing.
• The Congregation musters the pages you burned, one Thrall per card exhausted this battle, and exhausts itself.
• Read Aloud replaces Initiates, Thrall Call is what the pack runs on, and Eyeless Scribes costs 1.
• Loose Page says it plainly instead of leaning on a keyword, and the Hungering Sigils print Trap first, because on a body that is nothing but a spring, the spring is the card.

Cards that print the truth

• Wild Die adds its roll instead of replacing the attack. The Dice Golem's printed 4 was a number it never dealt. A 1-attack golem with Wild Die 6 now lands for 2 to 7, and his upgrade hands him a second die rather than a bigger one, both thrown side by side on the same swing.
• The Wildcard Egg hatches anything in your card pool. It advertised "any pack" and then rolled off the same hard-coded sixteen bodies every run. It is now every summon your drafted packs can field: if you could have drawn it, it can crack out of the shell.
• The Gunslinger's guns are printed at the half his rule doubles. Deputy 1, Rifleman 3, Deadeye 5, which is what 2, 6 and 10 look like before the warlord touches them. Six Chambers doubles the number and says so, in green.
• Armor, not Armored. The keyword printed three different ways depending on where you read it. It says "Armor 3" everywhere now, the way Shield has said "Shield 12" for months.
• Grand Gesture does not sway a lord. Charm cannot buy a commander's allegiance, so it was being billed straight out of the lord's health instead: half a boss's healthbar for two energy, at any range, on the turn of your choosing.
• Spearmen answer cavalry. Cavalry-Slayer 5, so the brace lesson the starter deck teaches has teeth against the charge lords it is aimed at.
• A wave you can spend. Every lane front carries a finite charge now. Six bodies and it peters out mid-lane, so units standing in the lane are the answer to a wave instead of a reason to hold your hand until it has gone by. A lane left empty still delivers the whole front to your throne.
• The Eternal always opens holding his relic and two cards, whether or not your profile has a winning run for it to read.
• Every card that stuns says how long it stuns, Hurled Log included. Seismic Steps says "nearby enemies" like every other card. Twenty keyword definitions now say the rule in one line and stop.
• The Serpent of Gold, and the chain it was the head of, are gone.

Screens and sound

• Cards lean under the pointer everywhere but the hand, tipping away from the cursor the way a card lying on a table tips under a finger, with a glint that follows the pointer across the face.
• Screen washes bloom instead of flashbanging. Ten separate beats each blew the frame to near-white in four frames, on their own numbers, over a screen that is near-black everywhere else. For a photosensitive player that is a hazard rather than juice. There is one ramped wash now instead of ten.
• The road ahead is dark again. Naming the commander on every reachable node turned the march into a menu you priced and shopped. The sheet still names the fight you are standing in and the ones you have already won, and the act boss keeps his tableau at the head of it.
• Uncle Jim has a theme, with an instrumental twin for vocals-off, and it remembers where it stopped.
• The menu theme plays once and hands off to the jukebox, which on the title screen draws on all 73 songs, shuffled so that nothing repeats until the library has cycled. The music also stops swapping every time you pick a pack.
• No lord ends up smaller than its own soldier, B backs out of the pack draft, and nothing pops over the finishing blow any more.

In the browser

The browser build lost about 19 MB this week, which is that much less to download before you can play. The fonts were carrying every character they could possibly draw; they now carry only the ones the game actually writes.

What's next

The clock was the thing this update went after: a shorter boss, a faster round, and a battle that shows you a field instead of a progress bar. If a run still overstays its welcome, or if Act 1 still reads as the wall it used to be, the in-game feedback button is the fastest way to tell me. Most of the list above started as a report from someone playing.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 8 August 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

An enemy lord spends a purse each round exactly like you do. That number was always there and you could never see it, so a fight that felt arbitrary was often just a lord spending three energy on eight bodies. This update puts the enemy's economy on the card, and gives its powers the same plain wording your own cards got.

You can read the enemy's budget

• Every enemy card shows its energy cost on the card's own gem. The Bestiary prints what the lord paid, so you can see where a fight's weight actually went.
• A summon card is named in the number it arrives in. Warren Goblins times four is a different card from Warren Goblins times eight, and they no longer look identical.
• The roster stands on three grounds: Normal, Elite and Boss, so you can see which shelf a thing you just lost to came off.

Enemy powers say what they do

• Open the Graves buys ten seconds of ground that is yours alone, and says so.
• The Green Tide throws a d20 you can watch land. It was always a roll. Now it is a roll you see.
• The foundry's Overload is the Lightning Storm, and it prints how long the Stun holds. It also aims its barrage at the front rank instead of going straight for your crown.
• Mob Rule pays out on the crowd rather than a flat point, and Contagion admits it catches its own strain.
• Shields say Shield 8 instead of describing an eight-point shield, which is the same rule in the same words the rest of the game uses.

Forbidden Lore settles in

• Marginalia joins the pack, and Blood Summon is retired.
• The Hungering Sigil got its own painting. The dome came off the circle, the arms ring it properly, and when something steps on the ward it reaches back.
• Initiates gain their Decay, and a named curse now reads in curse violet so you can tell it from a card you chose.
• The Warchief costs a rare slot, and the horde's cards say what they do. The Brass Sapper stopped wearing the face off his own card.

Screens

• The map's roads break into visible facets, two roads meeting end their edges in one corner, and a road that crosses itself stops inking over the join.
• The desk stops magnifying the chart and shows more road instead.
• The battle corner became one designed unit. Reaching for the top bar no longer scrolls the field out from under you, and the run bar stays tucked when the cursor is on another screen.
• Speed controls grew a real affordance, hairlines found the half pixel, and the boot card went sable with the rest of the game.
• The merchant's cart reads at a glance, the poison-seller's third row is a hand rather than a bow, and the round caption sits inside its band instead of on the line.
• A card you are given and the card flying to your hand are now one card, not two.

Also

• The mimic's lure chest is found by its shape rather than by where it sits.
• The turned earth beside each grave reads at battle zoom.
• Twenty packs stopped shouting in English on the eighth wedge of the wheel, and the graveyard, the foundry barrage and the horde's new wording all landed in ten languages.

What's next

The Bestiary now shows the enemy's economy, which means for the first time you can argue with it. If a fight still reads as unfair with the numbers visible, that is worth telling me, and the in-game feedback button is the fastest way. Most of the list above started as a report from someone playing.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 7 August 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

This is the biggest visual pass the game has had. Every screen was rebuilt into one design language, four of the five warlords stopped being costumes and became rules, and the Infernal Legion is gone. In its place is Forbidden Lore, a pack about reading things you should not.

Forbidden Lore replaces the Infernal Legion

• The devils are gone and the pack is about knowledge now. Nineteen cards, all new names and new art, in abyssal teal instead of hellfire. The Exhaust mechanic stayed, because burning a page you can never read again is what it was always describing.
• The starter summons four Initiates, and each one hands you a Decay. Decay costs nothing and exhausts, so the deck feeds its own triggers from the first deploy instead of waiting to draw the right card.
• The Author is the pack's crown jewel, unlocked at level 3. It arrives with three Decay already in your hand and turns every page you burn into both attack and a body.
• Two new evolution paths. Deep Study grows the thing that read the page. Unravelling breaks the thing it was read to.
• The Archdevil and the Imp went to Pyromancy, where the fire actually lives. Blood Summon went to Final Rites and was repainted for it.

A new keyword: Fork

• Fork Chain branches instead of bouncing. A normal Chain hops from body to body. Fork splits in two at every body it reaches, so it goes one, then two, then four, spreading through a crowd as a tree you can watch travel.
• The Tinderling brings it to Pyromancy, summoning two ranged sprites with On Strike: Burn 1. Upgraded, it forks twice as deep.
• Slow Burn is a new Pyromancy power: your Burn lasts twice as long on enemies, and it stacks. Every ember in the pack doubles in value without a single card changing its printed number.

One design language, on every screen

• Sable lacquer, cut corners, and gold that means you can touch it. The interface used to be four visual languages depending on where you were standing. It is one now, from the hero plate to the End Turn inlay.
• The Compendium stopped being its own game. It shelves packs the way playtesters actually pick them, evolutions sit with their pack, and pack blurbs say what the pack does.
• Card stat badges are struck, not whittled. A garnet for health, a lit weapon for attack, and a big number still fits inside its badge.
• Gold is a coin now rather than a diamond, and a gold cost reads as a cost.

The lord does not just die

• A finishing move. The killing blow is its own moment, filmed against the death it causes.
• The last screen is a coronation, and he dances through it.
• A cast spell stands over your lord until you have answered it, and every enemy spell telegraphs in its own language.
• The crown volley replaces every direct-damage pressure rail. Each lord throws something different, and you can see what is flying and what it carries.

The chest is a chest

• It opens. The lid strains against its lock, gives, and tips back, and the loot comes up out of it on real light rather than flat shapes. The whole prop is drawn in the game's own hand instead of being a picture set on top of the room.
• Your loot survives a save. Quitting to the menu and continuing used to deal you a different three relics. It does not any more.
• A relic you have already been offered will not come back for the rest of the run, from a chest or a shop.

The fight

• Chain hits full damage on every jump, and you can watch it travel.
• The battlefield is lit: one sun, sky-coloured shade, and a pool to fight in.
• The top bar gets out of the way, and the map icon rides it properly instead of hovering above the fight on its own layer.
• Counterattack split into Retaliate and Thorns, which were always two different rules wearing one name. Free Placement is Free Deploy. Ritual is Spectral Call. Cloak and Dagger is Rogue's Gambit, with a new crest.
• Every upgrade that rewords a card now says so in green, so you can see what you bought.
• The King stopped being immortal.

Also

• Four warlords stop being costumes. Each one's signature relic rewrites a rule of the game rather than handing out a number. The King is the baseline the others bend.
• The Mimic's mirror cracks when it turns, and every Mimic card shows your reflection rather than a chest.
• The medic's tonic is a choice of three, dealt one at a time. Coup de Grace sweeps the line. The Wildcard Egg's upgrade lays a second egg.
• Uncle Jim stops wearing his squirrels' sprite, and mends three quarters of your wounds rather than filling you to three quarters.
• Damage numbers stop hiding behind the status word they arrive with.
• The run counter says March instead of Day.

What's next

Forbidden Lore is brand new and has not had a week of real runs behind it yet. If the Exhaust engine feels like it stalls, or The Author feels like it never arrives, the in-game feedback button is the fastest way to say so. Most of the list above started as a report.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 7 August 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

This covers 0.5.59 through 0.5.62. Last time the hidden multipliers came out, which left every lord's difficulty living entirely in its roster, and said the rosters had not been retuned for that yet. This is that retune, plus the touch pass that makes the game playable on a phone.

The difficulty is in the rosters now, and the rosters were rebuilt

• Every enemy body is priced against the same law its lord's budget spends. With no multiplier left to hide behind, a creature that cost too little was simply free value, and a handful of them were carrying whole fights on their own.
• Act 1 lets you lose gracefully. The on-ramp hits softer rather than thinner. The opening act still brings a real army; it just stops deciding the run in the first two rounds.
• The run-killers come down to what a first clear can actually answer. The Swamp Treant was the fight rather than a unit in it, and thins out. The Hulking Troll is one you can kill. The Heartwood, the foundry and five stragglers get the same treatment.
• A boss's budget is parity. The extras are what make it a boss. Boss musters are a patrol's now, and bosses wear boss bars, with the old ramp paid back in squad size where you can see it.
• Three summoning spots, minimum, in every fight. Some layouts left you with fewer places to stand than cards to play.
• Morning Glare enrages the survivors instead of the whole army. Rabble is 1 cost, 6 bodies, Exhaust, and its upgrade doubles the bank. A splitter costs what it summons. A Swarm Rat sheds one cousin, not two.
• Movement Speed is the only speed a unit moves at. There was a second one.
• The Magma Magnate takes his hands off your crown. His fire asks the same price of a soldier as of a king, his kiln keeps the ground and drops the board wipe, and his lane fronts come every fourth round instead of every third.
• Uncle Jim is 6 attack and 45 health, down from 18 and 80. Eighteen a swing was more than some bosses carry in total, on a body with cleave and lifesteal behind it. His squirrels are 3/3 with Pounce, and they finally have a face.

The fight stops keeping secrets

• A telegraph tells you how long you have, not just that something is coming.
• A boss spell says whose head it is coming for, and a lane wave can be pointed at and asked what it is.
• The blast that killed you has a name.
• A boss that grows says its rate. A kiln that burns says for how long, and what its rage buys. Seven more things the fight was quietly doing now say so on screen.

It plays on a phone

• Every commit is a tap, and every screen fits a thumb. Sixteen screens were rebuilt to a phone's shape and floor rather than being an ultrawide layout squeezed sideways.
• Your finger is the pointer: aiming, hovering and the deck all follow it, and a tap casts where the finger is rather than where it last was.
• Every "click anywhere" surface waits for the finger to come back up, so the first touch of a scroll stops dismissing the thing you were trying to scroll.

Your potions are where you are already looking

• The flasks you are carrying now stand in an arc around the energy gem, half again the size of the belt chips, and you can click or drag them from there exactly as from the top bar. Playtesters were finishing whole runs without spending one, and the gem is the thing you look at every single turn.
• A potion played from either place empties both in the same frame.

Cards and text say the rule, then stop

• Keyword definitions drop their preambles, flavour and tips. Sixteen more lines say what the keyword does and end there, and card faces stop re-explaining keywords they have already named.
• The glossary says the rule and stops. The Commander's Heart says four things instead of four paragraphs. Four upgrade rungs say what they actually did.
• The compendium's sections are tabs now, wrapping in even ranks, and a name too long for its tab is trimmed and says so.
• A card that ends up fitting its plate no longer scrolls its text off the card. The shrink and the scroll were disagreeing about how much there was to read.
• Long card names sit on the banner's centre line. The Slime Lord is called the Slime Lord.

A card you are given stops arriving like a curse

• Gaining Uncle Jim, hatching the campfire's egg, and every borderless card an event hands over all played the curse cinematic: smoke, two red eyes and dread, over the rarest thing a run can give you. There is a gift reveal now: warm light, rising motes, a chime.
• Both reveals hold the card at the size a card in your hand lifts to, so you can read what you just got.
• Jim's Calling Card stops reciting his stats and links his actual card instead. Hover it and you see the card you will be holding.

Reloading does not reroll

• Your opening hand belongs to the run, not to the reload, and a lord musters off the run's seed. Quitting and coming back no longer deals you a different fight.

Also

• The fight ends when the lord falls, not when the banner finishes landing, and no screen flash when one does.
• The Verdant Queen's hive reads as a hive. Buff badges above a card wear their own power's icon. The march-on glow traces the plate instead of an oval.
• The title screen stops asking whether you meant to quit when there is nothing to lose.
• A Mac measures a cursor in points, and now gets handed points.
• Four locales stopped calling one card by two names in their lore, and the CJK locales stopped shipping a second word for cards they had already named.

What's next

The retune above was decided from live runs rather than from a simulator, and it is a first pass over a lot of numbers at once. If a fight now feels too soft or still feels unfair, the in-game feedback button is the fastest way to say so. Most of this list started as a report.

This post went out to players on itch.io on 6 August 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

This covers 0.5.57 and 0.5.58. The theme is honesty: the enemy used to get numbers you were never shown, and most of this update is about taking those away and putting the difficulty somewhere you can read it.

The enemy stops hiding its numbers

• Every lord takes the same three energy a round that you do. There was a per-encounter multiplier on how much an enemy could field, tuned separately from anything printed anywhere, and it went as low as one energy a round on some lords. That is below what you get, which is why a few commanders stood there summoning almost nothing. Now every lord in the game opens on three, and what makes one dangerous is which cards it holds.
• A spawned enemy carries exactly the stats the compendium prints for it. Enemy unit stats used to be scaled by a hidden number, so two identically named creatures could hit differently in two fights with nothing on screen to explain it.
• The difficulty dial is gone. It was buried in settings, it asked you to pick a difficulty before you had played a fight, and it only ever multiplied one thing.
• An Ascension rung does the twist it advertises and nothing else. Climbing the ladder used to also make every enemy quietly tougher on top of the named modifier.
• The acts march in a fixed order again: Verdant Reach, then Ember Wastes, then Frostspire. The per-run shuffle needed a stat re-base to work, and that re-base was the source of enemy numbers drifting for no reason you could see.

Fifteen lords raise their own armies

• No lord fields your cards any more. Fifteen commanders were drawing from a shared pool that included the player's own units, so you would meet your Spearman across the field wearing enemy colours. Every lord now musters its own bodies, and fifteen new creatures were drawn, named and translated to fill the gaps.
• The Slime pack gets a proper top: Slime Boss is now The Engulfer. The Sultan of Slime stops fielding your units. The Warsmith stops firing your guns.
• Seven enemy champions lean out of their own cards, and every one of the 47 commander cards now stands on painted ground of its own instead of a flat plate.

The whole campaign runs in a browser

The itch browser build was an Act 1 demo that stopped you at the boss. It is the full game now, all three acts, and it asks about a wishlist after Act 1 with a prompt you can dismiss rather than a wall you cannot pass. Every region's lord anthems fit in the browser build too, so acts two and three stop falling back to the general jukebox.

Real sound

The placeholder beeps are gone. Combat, spells and interface all run on produced audio now, material aware, so a hit on armour does not sound like a hit on flesh.

The bestiary tells you what you are fighting

• A lord's entry prints the health it actually fights with, and where its phases break.
• Health bars across the bestiary are drawn to one scale, so a 20 and an 80 look like a 20 and an 80.
• Cards read at their full lifted size, and captions clear the gem instead of sitting under it.

Events end on a verdict

• The result page opens by telling you how it went, then shows the arithmetic. It used to lead with the numbers and leave you to work out whether that was good.
• Fourteen outcomes get their own painted picture, and the aftermath art reacts to what happened rather than sitting still.
• Exit Fee asks before it takes your gold. A levy you cannot refuse is not a choice.
• The event bench rolls its own dice. Veteran's Trial is retired, because an event that is just another fight is not an event.

Balance

• The Commander's Heart is the only death save in the game, and it beats once an act. It stands the King back up at just over a third of his health. Second Wind is folded into it rather than being a second, quieter safety net. The other four warlords have none by design.
• A boss that refuses to die comes back at half health, not just over half.
• Cleansing Tears now leaves Regen 2 behind after the wash.
• The Flatterer's base Charm goes from 1 to 2.
• The Lone Bulwark stops outstatting the bosses it fights beside, and a shield wall holds its lane without also winning the trade.
• Smouldering Cinders sear for 1 true damage every 3 seconds, down from every second.
• The Magma Magnate asks for less at both of his breaks, and his brutes stop hitting like a boss.
• Your reserves march in when the line thins, not only when it breaks.

Reading and playing

• Plurals are words now. Spearmans, Dire Wolfs and Deputys have become Spearmen, Dire Wolves and Deputies.
• The last 75 untranslated strings are done, so all ten languages are complete.
• End Turn either leaves your hand where it is or takes it all the way down, with nothing in between.
• A queued play reads at the same size as a card in your hand.
• The speed you pick stays picked, whatever else you touch on the way.
• The battle camera can pull further back on an ultrawide, and the interface scale reads height and aspect instead of guessing from width.
• The title screen was rebuilt: a forged plaque, a menu that holds still, and a giant you can actually read behind it.

Controller and co-op

• You can type on a pad, back out of the title screen with B, and reach the speed controls from the number row.
• Sixteen screens the reach audit had never visited are now walkable, including the feedback form, which used to raise the on screen keyboard and trap you before Send.
• A joiner sees the fight instead of guessing at it, and afflictions and Powers announce themselves on a joiner too.
• The War Council is one page that hosts by default.

Also

• The first campaign win opens the roster and says so.
• Chest glow is light now rather than a printed circle, banners hang from a real rod, and enemy ambient particles match the creature making them.
• Your commander's blood reads differently from anyone else's on the field.

What's next

The hidden multipliers are gone, which means a lord's roster is now the only place its difficulty lives, and the rosters have not been retuned for that yet. That is the next job, and it gets decided from what actually happens in your runs rather than from a simulator. If a fight feels wrong in either direction, the in game feedback button is the fastest way to tell me. Most of the list above started as a report.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 5 August 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam

Five builds have gone out since I last wrote one of these, so this covers 0.5.52 through 0.5.56. Most of it is the fight itself: what it looks like, what it sounds like, and how much of it you can read while it is happening.

The fight looks like a fight now

• Archers loose real arrows and melee lands real swings. Damage used to simply appear on a unit. Every attack now has ammunition you can watch cross the field, or a swing you can see connect.
• The arena breathes. The camera pushes in once the opening taunts are done, the ground answers a heavy landing, and your commander visibly takes the hits that reach him.
• A boss arrives with his name. The fly-over lands, his nameplate slams in on a forged strip coloured by his first phase, he postures, the ground shakes, and then he talks. It used to read as a drive-by.
• Your Turn and Enemy Turn are a moment rather than a word. A smoked-glass band across the screen, two gilt rails drawing out from the centre, one shaft of light sweeping the lettering. It spends the same time the old pop did.
• Chests strain before they give. Three heaves with light leaking wider from under the lid on each, then the burst, then every relic's gem launches out of the mouth, arcs, and lands on its cartouche a beat apart. The bar of light drawn across the chest that a playtester reported as a loading bar is gone, because it was never a loading bar.
• The weather is audible. Arenas with weather in them now sound like it.
• Reduce motion still turns all of that off and keeps the plain version.

The road to the boss

• The act boss is the end of the road, not a chip on it. He stands on the parchment at full width now, region-shaped ridges receding behind him, the cartographer's pen bearing down along the ground he stands on, and a warm pool of light gathering and breathing behind him once the road reaches him.
• The Twins hold one node with a single split face.
• The pack draft zoom now dives at the field, and a chosen genie rises out of the card you picked.

Reading the fight

• A silenced unit's keywords are struck through. Silence used to print every keyword in full gold, so there was no way to see what had actually stopped. The ones the hush really takes are struck out and drained to grey, their definition panels grey with them, and the ones that keep working, like Mitosis and Requiem, stay upright.
• Every status names its clock. Silenced 5s, Slow 4s, Burn 3/s 4s, counting down live while you hover instead of leaving you to guess.
• Relics stop lying about their triggers. The trigger families now sit behind the same gate as everything else, so Unlocks says what it means, and Locked Shields says Shield 2 rather than something vaguer.
• The upgrade green lands on the number that changed rather than on the trigger word beside it.
• The Herald's discount reads "all your Bugs cost 1 less to play" instead of "all your Bugs gain cost 1 less to play".

It fits on a laptop

Every full-screen view now holds together at 1440x900, which is where the layout floor sits. The arena's bench bar folds onto a second line instead of hanging FIGHT off the right edge, character select swaps to swatches when the window is short, and all 47 screens get stood up at both ends of the range and photographed so the next one that breaks gets caught before it ships.

Controller

• The pad you pick up is the pad that works. Plugging in a second controller mid-session used to leave the game listening to the first one.
• Picking a card and playing it are two decisions again.
• End Turn hands you the fight back, and can press its own button.
• The deck overlay is walkable card by card, and a card revealed at the edge of a scrolled list comes out from under the fold whole instead of with its cost gem or its stat discs sliced off.
• A step means the next thing along the same row or column. Diagonals only when the line holds nothing. The settings footer used to send every sideways step into the full-width Wishlist row a line below.
• The focus ring learned every shape a card face actually has.
• Inspect mode settles in and out, Y means what it says, the potion popup answers and puts itself away, and the quit confirm takes a controller again.

In the browser

The itch embed was reading as a small laptop panel to the automatic interface scale, which took a size bump and shrank the canvas below what the layouts assume. That is the "things drawing on top of each other" report, and it is fixed: the web build pins the scale, so the whole design canvas is there and simply rendered smaller. There is also a real way out of the frame now. F11 or the settings checkbox asks the browser for actual fullscreen, and the main menu grows a Toggle fullscreen row one click from the title.

Balance

• Two Barrel Tosses are two barrels. A second copy used to fatten the same keg and still send one barrel down one lane. Every copy now throws its own barrel down its own lane and grows its own charge, 5 and 5, then 10 and 10, and a copy gained mid-battle starts fresh rather than inheriting the veteran's charge. Lanes come out of a bag so two kegs never land perfectly stacked. The round's total damage is unchanged. It just covers twice the ground.

Also

• The battle onboarding teaches the speed controls.
• The window flies the banner icon rather than the old lion shield.

What's next

Act 1 is still where most runs end and Act 3 barely appears in the death statistics, so difficulty across the run is what I am looking at. One thing that got much clearer this month: the Boar King is the single biggest killer in the game at 26 deaths, which is 23% of every run that ends in a loss. He read as a tie for first until a telemetry fix stopped filing him under four different names at once.

If something in here reads wrong, or you hit something that is not on the list, use the in-game feedback button. Most of the above came from a report.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 3 August 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, in the Discord, or through the quill in game.

Read this post on pbandgames.com · Wishlist Cardboard Conquest on Steam