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.

Attention Steam Deck / Linux Players - Force Proton!

Hey everyone,

It appears a recent Steam Deck update broke the native build of Pawnbarian - the game launches, but isn't playable. I can't check right now, but I assume the same is true for Linux on regular PCs. I'm figuring out a maintenance fix, but until then, you can get the game to work by forcing the use of Proton:

icon / right click Properties Compatibility Force [...] choose Proton instead of Steam Linux Runtime, e.g. Proton 9.0-4

Apologies for the inconvenience. Thanks for dropping by to play Pawnbarian!

Cheers,
Jan

[ 2025-06-04 12:43:23 CET ] [Original Post]