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, or through the quill in game.

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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, or through the quill in game.

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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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, or through the quill in game.

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