Build 0.2.0-test.2 · Steam Playtest

Anachron has been rebuilt from scratch. Same champions, same cards, same rules you remember, but the game around them is new: there is finally a tutorial, you can play offline against a bot, a dropped connection no longer costs you the match, and the whole thing speaks four languages. Here is what is in your hands.

The whole card game is here

• 5 champions and 60 action cards, with every ability working the way it was meant to.
• 49 status effects, including a lot of the ones the old version never really told you about.
• Card text explains itself. Hover any keyword and it tells you what it does, right there on the card, in the mulligan, in the discard pile, anywhere it shows up.
• Mulligan, Struggle, Extra Action, hand limit, overtime. The full ruleset, not a trimmed version of it.

Two modes the game never had before

The original dropped you straight into a match against a stranger and wished you luck. Both of these are new.

• A tutorial. A guided match that teaches you the board one move at a time, then a walkthrough that builds your first deck with you. It runs the first time you launch and you can replay it from the menu any time after that.
• Practice against the bot. A full match against an AI opponent, offline. No queue, no waiting for somebody to be online, no server at all. Learn a champion, test a deck you just built, or play at three in the morning when nobody else is around. Practice wins even count toward the reward ladder, at a slower rate.
• Two starter decks come already built, so you can learn the cards by playing them instead of reading them.

Matches that actually finish

• The clock rewards playing. 60 seconds a turn, plus 5 more every time you play a card and 10 every time you draw one. Sit and think and it costs you. Act and you buy the time back.
• Overtime. When both decks run dry, fatigue starts taking champions until somebody falls. No more games that go nowhere.
• Nobody can stall you out. Every prompt has its own timer, so a player who walks away mid-match does not freeze your game.
• The board says what it is waiting for. Who can still act, who is exhausted, who cannot be targeted, and whose turn is holding things up.

Deck building

• Deck Vault. Build as many decks as you want, name them, edit them, swap which one is active. Two starter decks are ready to go if you would rather just play.
• 4 champions and 60 cards a deck, with a limit of two champions per role, so you cannot stack four attackers.
• Search and filters by champion, by role, and by what is already in the deck.
• Skins. Champions with alternate art can be dressed up before a match, and you can open any illustration at full size.
• Your leader picks the arena. Whoever sits in your first slot decides which coliseum you fight in. Looks only, it changes no rules.
• Avicenna and Hypatia are in the roster as locked tiles so you can see who is coming. Not playable yet.

Online

• Losing connection no longer loses the match. You get 45 seconds to come back and pick up exactly where you were. If your opponent is the one who dropped, the game waits and tells you so instead of leaving you staring at a frozen board.
• Nobody can peek. Your opponent's hand and deck order never reach their PC, so there is nothing to look at even if somebody wanted to.
• Wins are counted on our side. Progress cannot be edited from your end.
• Your Steam name is your name. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to log into.

Rewards for playing

• Six tiers of unlocks: emotes, profile icons, titles and card sleeves, from your first win up to twenty.
• Practice counts too, at a slower rate, and it banks while you are offline.
• Wins count from round 5 on, so nobody farms the ladder with instant concessions.
• A profile page with your ladder progress, your whole collection, your stats and your recent matches.
• Emotes mid-match, one chibi per champion with its own line. You can turn the opponent's off if they get on your nerves.

The arena feels alive

• Every coliseum has its own weather. Dust rolling across Cleopatra's desert, sea spray over Blackbeard's deck, cherry petals in Sun Tzu's garden, embers around El Cid's camp.
• Redone combat effects: sword strikes, damage numbers, blocks, heals, shields and status pulses that read at a glance.
• Champions talk, when they are picked up, when they are played, when they land a hit, with subtitles if you want them.
• Animated portraits and a moving menu backdrop, both of which you can switch off.

Play it your way

• Four languages: English, Italian, Spanish and Simplified Chinese. All the way through: interface, card text, keywords, subtitles. The game follows your system language unless you tell it otherwise, and two players in different languages can sit in the same match with each of them reading it in their own.
• Text size sliders for interface, headers and card text, separately.
• Subtitle controls: size, how solid the panel behind them is, top or bottom, speaker name on or off.
• Windowed, borderless or fullscreen, with a resolution picker.
• Music, sound effects and voice on their own sliders.
• A motion toggle that stops the animated backdrop and portrait sweeps if that sort of thing bothers you.

Tell us what broke

• Report or send feedback without leaving the game: from the match itself, from the result screen, or from the menu.
• Bug reports bring the match with them. The last stretch of what happened on the board is attached automatically, and you can read exactly what is going before you hit send.
• Recent opponents are listed on the feedback screen, so if you meant to report someone and the match ended first, you can still find them.

Fixed in this build

• Targeting on four champion cards.
• Blackbeard's sword swing playing mirrored.
• Blackbeard's missing pick up and play voice lines.
• Ocracoke's Last Stand now says what it is waiting for, and shows the number.
• Impact sounds levelled so nothing spikes.
• The main menu no longer flickers when the news panel loads.
• Escape now closes only the dialog on top, not everything at once.
• Online matches breaking right after the mulligan.

This is a playtest and we expect you to find things. When something looks wrong, report it from inside the game so the match comes with it. That is the fastest way from your board to a fix.