V0.0.17

ChessDeck 0.017 devlog

Your pieces defend each other now, and losing them costs you something.

Losing pieces has a cost

• The Fallen: whenever one of your pieces is destroyed, a Fallen card goes into your discard pile. It's a dead card that clogs your draws. 
• Normal fights hit harder. Every normal fight in acts 2 and 3 now has one piercing attack. Camps heal 20% instead of 25%.

Guard

• A piece standing on a square another of your pieces covers gets a point of guard for each piece covering it. Guard soaks hits before life does. Coverage follows chess capture rules, so a pawn covers its two forward diagonals.
• Crush, slay and crater ignore guard, so a tight formation still has something that breaks it.
• Click a piece to see which pieces it covers and which cover it. The boxes also stay on screen while you move a piece.

New cards and relics

• 21 new cards. Several use the Fallen: Rally the Fallen, Requiem, Pyre, Bury the Dead, Pallbearers. Others are draw and filtering cards: Cull, Sift, Scout Ahead, Quartermaster, Dispatch. Close Ranks and Honour Guard play into guard.
• 8 new relics, including Ossuary, Charnel Pennant, Widow's Banner, Signal Banner and Sharpened Stakes.
• Balance:
  • Snipe no longer gets weaker each time you play it.
  • Martyr is now common.
  • Tourniquet is now rare and Reserve Muster uncommon.
  • Last Rites costs 2 and its damage is capped.
  • Volley deals more damage.
  • No Retreat now gives its block at the start of your next turn.

Shorter runs

• White deck runs are shorter: 36 map nodes instead of 42.

Presentation

• Music and sound effects added, with volume settings.
• Tutorial: a few picture slides the first time you reach the map. You can open it again from Settings.
• Animations run twice as fast by default, and the top speed is now 4×.
• New icons:
  • A flame on cards that exhaust
  • A badge for Snatch
  • A badge for No Retreat
• When a Fallen lands, the pile that takes it flips it face up so you can see what was added.

Heads up

Saves from 0.016 won't carry over, so any run in progress will start fresh. Your profile and unlocks are kept.