Pawnbarian: a Puzzle Roguelike

j4nw

In-app purchases

About this game

Chess-inspired puzzle roguelike. Demo - single IAP unlocks full game.

The ad-free demo contains a single character and dungeon.

Pawnbarian is a turn-based puzzle roguelike with bite-sized, but challenging sessions. Play cards to control your hero like a chess piece on a tiny dungeon board, outmaneuver enemies with their assortment of tricky abilities, and become the mightiest warrior of the Chesslands!

Features
- Use a deck of chess pieces to hack and slash through hordes of monsters.
- Pick up the basics instantly if you're familiar with chess, or learn in minutes if you aren't.
- Carefully plan your moves to navigate challenging, emergent tactical situations.
- Spend treasure to upgrade your cards with additional powers.
- Blitz through quick 15-30 minute runs - or die trying.
- Take on the infinite post-run Gauntlet to see how long you can survive.
- Pick from 6 characters to conquer 3 dungeons, all requiring an unique approach.
- Progress through Chains, a series of extra difficulty modifiers.

Not Features
- No permanent upgrades, and not much that needs unlocking. The progress and satisfaction come from your growing mastery of the game's elegant systems!
- No complex and varied builds. The shops provide a few key decisions, but the bulk of the roguelike depth lies in how you approach the emergent combat puzzles!

Ratings and reviews

Its a pretty fun concept., but the balance of the classes need work. The Shogun, in particular, borders on unplayable because you'll frequently find yourself unable to do anything based soley on RNG. It feels bad when a stretgy/tactic game throws you in unwinnable situations where you literally can't move or do anything multiple turns in a row. I just has to pass turn and take a defeat that felt arbitrary. All in all though? Fun game and well designed.

I have this on PC too, and it's as excellent on phone as it was on PC, maybe even a little better. The touch controls are integrated seamlessly into the game and this might be THE way to play it. The game itself is very fun, needing a fair amount of strategy to beat each dungeon and having a ton of characters to try out as well, but is also fun to play in short bursts on say the train or while on a break. It's an excellent little game, I can't recommend it enough especially for all of $5.

Demo is great, full game is Dissappointing. Cards can upgrade attack, defence, or speed. Different unlocked stages make one of these 3 upgrade categories unusable, but the core strategies and enemies are too simple/similar to stage 1. The new characters are interesting, but the stages are not interesting enough for it to matter. A hero is only as good as their villian. Map size never grows. Later stages just cram enemies in. Every square is threatened. The puzzle is lost.

What's new

Maintenance engine and API version update