Pawnbarian (tuxdb.com)

Pawnbarian is a minimalist puzzle roguelike. It's built around the core mechanic of using chess moves to control your adventurer on a tiny dungeon board.

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 tricky, 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 3 characters with unique rules to conquer 3 dungeons full of varied monsters.
Progress through Chains, a series of extra difficulty settings.

What Pawnbarian is not

Pawnbarian is not a full-fledged roguelike with deep and varied builds to explore. There is a bit of progression over the course of a run, but the core of the game is dealing with a variety of enemies, and figuring out what to do each turn.
Think of it as a highly replayable puzzle game with a roguelike card battler feel.

Pawnbarian is one year old

...and I'm holding a record low 50% off sale to celebrate!

I have no surprise patches prepared, but as a small treat, check out this lovely piece I comissioned from my buddy SquareAnon . It's sized exactly to potentially serve as a 16:9 4K wallpaper.
Game Description Image open full size
Pawnbarian matured and expanded a lot over the past year, got localized into 15 languages thanks to your generous contributions, and goes a long way towards letting me and my co-creators support ourselves and letting us pursue new creative endeavors. As always - thank you!

As I've consistently said, there are no more major content updates planned, but I'm never saying never. In the meantime, I hope Pawnbarian will continue to make you launch one more run once in a while, and be enjoyed by some new arrivals as well. It's a game I'm immensely proud of.

I'm slowly working towards some new turn-based, boardgame-inspired thingy, possibly even smaller in scale than Pawnbarian. There's a good chance I'll initially launch it as a work-in-progress, browser-playable demo, much like I did with Pawnbarian.

If you'd like to keep an eye out, there are a bunch of ways you can do that:

follow me on Twitter to see random creative endeavors and the occasional funpost
join my Discord to get a rare @everyone ping with substantial news and chat with some chill peeps
join my newsletter to get a rare e-mail with substantial news
follow my Steam dev page to get a SECRET RARE notification when I release something new here

Cheers!
j4

[ 2022-09-26 17:04:21 CET ] [Original Post]