Games
Rank & File
A chess roguelite. The realm has fallen and only the commoners stayed. You are the King; your army is a miller's son, a poacher, a deserter or two. Stand them in the line and raise them, rank by rank. If the King dies, the run ends.
Best on a laptop or desktop: you hover enemies to see what they intend. Runs save in your browser. One act takes about twenty minutes.
How it plays
Grid tactics
Every unit, yours and theirs, acts in order of speed. Move, then attack, use your ability, or wait. Forests cost movement and give cover.
Nothing hidden
Hover an enemy to see exactly what it will do on its turn. Press T to shade every tile that can be struck before you act again. No dice, anywhere.
Sword, shield, magic
Steel is stopped by armour; spells go straight through it. A Rook laughs at swords and dies to a tome. Shields raise defence, wards raise resistance.
Capes
Recruits are Pawns. A cape promotes one into a Rook, Knight, Bishop or Queen, within chess limits. When a promoted unit dies, the cape falls where they stood. Go and get it.
They grow
Levels from hits and kills, a talent at levels three, six and nine, an origin each. At camp you can sit with one of them by the fire.
Three acts
The Overgrown Ruins, the Drowned Halls, the Obsidian Keep. Each with its own boss, and a Black King waiting at the end.
Banners
Every run opens with a banner: a rule the whole band fights under. Hold the line as a shield wall, hunt sleeping packs, or let fallen capes carry their levels on. Fourteen banners, four schools, more offered after elites and bosses.
The Annals
Every finished run goes into the book: who was King, which banners flew, who rose and who fell, and where. Win rate, best act, the deadliest unit you ever raised.
How it was made
It started as a design document for a Godot project. I handed the document to Claude with full creative freedom and asked how far it could take it; the answer was a playable browser game in an afternoon, then a second pass with a story, a sword-shield-magic layer and the information tools you see in games like Into the Breach, then humanoid characters with real animation, then banners and the Annals. It is one HTML file with no engine, and it is still being balanced, so expect to lose.
Type a seed on the title screen to replay a map. Sound can be muted from the top bar.