I · The pieces
Seven pieces. The gate column shows what you need before you can recruit one. There are no unit levels and no upgrades. A Rogue on turn 60 is the same Rogue you bought on turn 3.
| Piece | Gold | HP | Dmg | Move | Reach | Arm | Gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rogue | 40 | 78 | 28 | 2 | 1 | skirmisher | start |
| Brute | 50 | 150 | 32 | 2 | 1 | infantry | start |
| Ranger | 70 | 64 | 22 | 1 | 2 | archer | a camp |
| Knight | 80 | 130 | 40 | 2 | 1 | shock | a mine |
| Giant | 120 | 170 | 18 | 2 | 1 | shock | two keeps |
| Druid | 80 | 210 | — | 2 | 1 | infantry | the Grove |
| Mage | 100 | 80 | 28 | 1 | 3 | archer | the Warden |
The Ranger strikes 2 hexes in any direction. The Mage strikes 3, but only straight down a hex line. Everything else has to be standing next to its target. No terrain bonus gives reach to a piece that does not already have it.
II · Taking a turn
Each of your pieces may move once and strike once per turn. You can do either on its own, in whichever order suits you. A piece with an action left wears a coloured ring on the ground.
Press UNITS in the top bar to jump to the next piece that still has something to do. The number on the button is how many are left. When it reads zero your turn is finished, and you press END.
Moving next to an enemy piece stops your movement for that turn. This is the zone of control. It is how you block a road, screen a wounded piece, or trap something against the map edge. Knights are the exception, because they leap and no zone holds them.
Green hexes are where the selected piece can move. Red hexes are inside an enemy's reach next turn, so anything you leave standing on one should expect to be hit. Small green circles are where you may lay a farm.
Health bars sit above wounded pieces. Yours run green to amber to red as they fall. Enemy bars are always red, so you never have to work out whose bar you are reading.
III · Reach and ground
Melee pieces walk 2 hexes. The Ranger and the Mage walk 1 and buy that back with reach. Terrain adds to movement. It never adds to reach.
| Ground | Who benefits | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Roads and your own farms | Knight · Brute · Druid · Giant | +2 movement |
| Forest | Rogue · Ranger | +2 movement, and they cannot be targeted unless something stands beside them |
| Roads | everyone else | +1 movement |
| Beside rock | Brute · Druid | takes 25% less damage |
| High ground | everyone | +25% damage striking down at something below you |
| High ground | Ranger · Mage | +1 reach |
A piece fighting on ground that suits it is worth more than the same piece caught in the open. Scouts belong in the trees. Heavy troops belong on your own roads and fields. Archers belong on a ridge.
Raised hexes stand a step above the rest of the board and you can see the step. Nothing about them slows you down, so a ridge is worth taking for what it does to your damage rather than for what it costs your opponent to climb.
A river runs across the middle of every map, between the two castles. Nothing walks through water. There are three bridges spread along it, and every route from your half to theirs has to cross at one of them. The road crosses at the middle span.
Bridges are the tightest ground on the board. Holding one closes a whole flank, and a Knight is the only piece that can leap past a body standing on it.
IV · The Mage's V
The Mage is a line piece. It strikes along the six hex rays only, out to three hexes. The blast opens into a V across that ray and the next one round, so it can catch two pieces at once when they are standing badly.
The Mage sits at M. It fires along one ray; the blast covers that ray and its neighbour, two hexes deep. Six possible V orientations, one per ray.
Everything off those two rays is untouched, including hexes that sit well within two of the Mage.
Standing off the rays is genuinely safe. A Mage two hexes away with no line on you cannot touch you. That is what makes it a positional piece rather than a blanket threat.
V · Counters and retaliation
Anything you strike hits back. If the defender can reach you from where it stands, it immediately returns half its damage. That counter is free. It does not cost the defender their own action, and you cannot counter a counter. Buildings never hit back.
Reach decides who can answer. A Ranger shot from three hexes away cannot reply. A melee piece struck by an adjacent attacker always can. Picking a fight is never free, which is what makes screening and body-blocking worth the trouble.
skirmisher → archer → shock → infantry → skirmisher
The piece that starts the fight strikes at ×1.15, because choosing the engagement is worth something. Attacking with the counter deals ×1.5, and attacking against it ×0.7. The damage number tells you which happened as it lands. Aqua is a counter you landed, red is one you took.
| Arm | Pieces | Beats |
|---|---|---|
| Skirmisher | Rogue | archer |
| Archer | Ranger · Mage | shock |
| Shock | Knight · Giant | infantry |
| Infantry | Brute · Druid | skirmisher |
VI · Abilities
What each piece does beyond its stat line.
| Verb | Who | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Leap | Knight | vaults to any hex 2 away, or charges 3 straight; ignores zone of control |
| Guard aura | Druid — and it never attacks | adjacent allies take ×0.82 |
| Siege | Giant | ×3.0 vs structures, ×0.5 vs people |
| Pillage | Knight · Mage | razes an enemy farm outright, +20 gold |
| Conceal | Rogue · Ranger | cannot be targeted in forest unless something stands beside them (fog mode only) |
| Farm heal | Knight | +25 standing on your own farmland |
Any piece can knock down a farm. Only the Knight and the Mage take the 20 gold for it, and only when the owner has not claimed the Grove's staff. Burning farmland is often worth more than killing a soldier, because it costs your opponent income for the rest of the match.
VII · Land and money
Your castle pays 8 gold a turn on its own — enough to keep the lights on, nowhere near enough to field an army. Everything else comes from the ground you hold.
| Holding | Cost | Built on | Pays |
|---|---|---|---|
| Camp | 40 | a forest hex | +5 a turn, and opens the Ranger |
| Mine | 45 | a rock hex | +6 a turn, and opens the Knight |
| Farm | 20 & rising | any open ground near a castle or keep | +4 a turn |
| Keep | 60 & rising | a hex ringed by six of your farms | +7 a turn, and two keeps open the Giant |
A works stands on the resource itself, and it opens a hero. A camp is raised among the trees, a mine is cut into the outcrop — not beside them. So the legal sites are exactly the terrain you can already see, and every one of them wears a marker when you pick up the tool. Both must sit on your half of the board.
Neither runs dry. A camp and a mine pay the same on turn 90 as on turn 9. You raise each one once and then you spend the rest of the match making sure it is still standing, because a works is a building on the board and not an upgrade in a menu: burn theirs and the hero goes with it until they rebuild.
So the terrain in your half decides which army you can field. This is the map's doing, and maps are not symmetric: one house may open onto twenty outcrops and the other onto a single crag. The house with the woods fields Rangers and fights at range; the house with the crags fields Knights and closes the distance. Neither is stronger. They are different problems, and you find out which one you have been handed on turn one.
When your half holds only one legal mine site, that hex is the most valuable ground on the board and both players know exactly where it is. Scarcity gives the fight a location. It is the closest this game gets to a lane.
Farms are the plain option, for ground with nothing on it. They must be laid within two hexes of a castle or a keep, so your fields grow outward from what you hold rather than appearing wherever you fancy. Ring a single hex with six of your own farms and you may raise a Keep in the middle of it, which pays, musters troops, and becomes a new centre to farm out from.
There is no cap on fields or keeps — the price is the brake, and it compounds. Each farm costs 13% more than the last: the first is 20, the sixth 37, the twelfth 77, the eighteenth 160. Around two closed rings a field stops paying for itself inside any horizon that matters, and the sensible coin goes to a camp or a mine instead — out on the terrain, where it can be reached, and burned.
A farm on their half of the board earns +2 extra. A keep past the midline earns +4 extra. Ground you have to defend is worth more than ground nobody will ever come for.
Your first three soldiers are free to keep. After that each one costs more than the one before it, so a lean force is cheap and a crowd is not. On eight farms the curve runs like this:
| Army | Upkeep | Net income | Turns to a Knight |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0–3 | 0 | 56 | 0.8 |
| 4 | 2 | 54 | 0.8 |
| 6 | 12 | 44 | 1.0 |
| 8 | 30 | 26 | 1.7 |
A large army is paid for with farmland. At 14 farms an army of eight still nets well over 40 a turn. This is the coupling the whole game turns on: you cannot field a bigger force than your land will feed, so taking ground and taking fights are the same problem. Losing your last soldier is not fatal, because your castle raises a free Rogue.
VIII · The two prizes
Two neutral objectives sit on the map, on the diagonal your castles do not occupy. Both are the same distance from both players, so going after one costs you ground towards the other. That choice is the whole point of them.
| Prize | How to claim it | Unlocks | Relic |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Warden | kill it. It is hostile to both armies and strikes anything standing beside it. It never returns | Mage — for the killer, and nobody else, all match | Crystal: +3 gold a turn and +1 movement |
| The Grove | walk onto the lit staff. There is no fight | Druid | Staff: your farms are warded, so razing one pays the raider nothing |
The Grove reappears somewhere else once taken, so the slower house still gets its Druid in the end. Being first there only buys you time — and the staff, which stays with whoever claimed it first.
The Warden does not come back. Whoever puts it down is the only house that will field a Mage for the rest of the match, and the other side simply never gets one. It is the only thing on the board you can lose outright, which is what makes the race for it worth losing pieces over.
IX · Winning
You win by pulling their castle down. Land does not win — it pays for the army that does.
- Razeknock down the enemy castle
- Outlasthold the stronger war machine when time is called
Ordinary soldiers barely scratch masonry — a Rogue needs dozens of blows to bring a castle down. A Giant does it roughly three times faster, and a Giant wants two keeps, which want farms, which want stone, which wants an outcrop somebody has to go and take. That chain is the game: everything you build points at the castle you are trying to reach.
If the clock runs out the match is weighed on the castle first, then the army and the works keeping it in the field. Farmland counts for a little, as the thing paying for all of it, but never enough to win by sitting on it.
Losing your whole army is not a loss. Your castle raises a free Rogue and you carry on. You can also concede from the menu when a position is decided.
A turn clock is available from the start screen. Untimed, Rapid at 45 seconds, or Blitz at 20. Untimed is the default when you are playing the AI.
Every match ends with a report showing land, gold, farms and army for both players, round by round.