Tutorial

There is no tutorial in game, so here is a description.

Level/Demo Gameplay:

Goal: defeat all the waves of monsters

Game loop: 1. Draw 5 cards. If draw pile does not have enough cards, shuffle discard pile to form a new draw pile and draw

2. spend your mana to play cards. NOTE: some cards "exile" when played meaning they are removed from the deck entirely rather than being discarded.

3. end player turn, discard cards in hand.

4. monsters move towards waypoint(s) in order from 1 to 4. Monsters have base movement of 6. If a monsters reaches waypoint 4 (the player) it's game over, you are defeated.  If a monster reaches a waypoint, it will "refresh"/move again. It will also summon the next wave of monsters (minimum 3 turns between waves) so watch out! Also, some monsters have end-of-turn triggers (see Monsters section below)

5. Towers you have summoned attack monsters. In case you miss it on the cards, currently all towers have a range of 6. NOTE on LoS (Line-of-Sight): walls and towers do not block LoS so don't worry about that while placing them to build your maze.

NOTE: Towers can be summoned on walls to replace them. There is a visual bug where the wall remains, this will be fixed in an update.

6. Hero turn. Move and use abilities!

7. If there are no monsters left, spawn the next wave. If there are no more waves, you win!

8. Start a new turn from step 1.

See Building a Maze Tutorial section below for hints on "mazing" in the game.

Controls:

- Camera Controls:

WASD: pan camera up, left, down, and right

QE: rotate camera

middle mouse: zoom in/out

Screen description: right-click and "open in new tab" to view image as itch displays it tiny

Burn:

Some cards/effects will say they apply burn(x). Burn is a stacking damage debuff that will damage the monster on the start of the monster turn (rather then right away/when the burn is applied). Base damage is equal to the number of burn stacks the monster is suffering from. The number of stacks will then decrease by 1. So, if there are 10 stacks of burn at the start of the monster turn, the monster will take 10 damage and burn will decrease to 9. If no additional burn is applied, on the next turn, monster will take 9 damage and burn will decrease to 8, and so on until burn reaches 0. So, total damage from 10 stacks of burn = 10+9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1 = 55.

Burn Towers: These not only apply burn(2) but increase damage per stack by 1 each. So, if you have 2 Burn Towers, a monster with 10 burn will take 10*3 damage on it's turn.

Monsters

Some monsters have special abilities of note:

This is a Portal Demon (above). On death, it will drop a teleporter which will link with the level's starting teleporter and allow monsters to teleport between said teleporters.

This monster (above) will buff ALL monsters health by 30 at end of its turn (unless paralyzed. See stasis field card). It also only has 2 movement so will stay back buffing the rest of its team. Sneaky.

This monster (above) will add a "useless card" to your discard pile at end of its turn, making your future draws worse.

Building a Maze Tutorial:

Some of you don't like the hex grid as you can't tell where monsters will move as they head to the waypoint. While true, this should incentivize you more to build a "maze" and direct monsters' movement so I do not consider the hex grid to be a negative. Of course, a square grid is not out of the question if it turns out that is what people want. Also, why not have both?

By extending walls as indicated above, we can start to direct the movement of the monsters. While we still do not know which of the "dotted" tiles the monsters will take along the path, we do know they will head along the drawn path and can place our damaging towers accordingly.