Start here

The route from the main menu into the first fight. Every screen below is from the current build (v0.20.286), on the keyboard; a gamepad does the same with its South button (A / ✕) as Enter.

GameplayAim, cast, dodge, draft. SettingsDisplay, sound, play, controls.

From the menu to the road

1. Main menu: choose New campaign. Codex holds every hero, spell and creature you have met, Achievements the ledger, and Controls the key and button lists for keyboard and gamepad.
2. Players: four seats. Press Enter (or South on a pad) to take a seat; each keyboard or pad that presses takes the next open one. One seat is a whole game: the game balances every fight for one to four players.
3. Choose a hero: ← → browse the sixteen heroes, Enter chooses. Each card shows the hero's element and three talent trees. When every taken seat has chosen, Enter once more goes on to the difficulty.
4. Difficulty: four tiers, and the one you pick stays for the whole campaign. Story: your spells cannot hurt your friends. Normal: friendly fire is on. Hard: shorter enemy warnings, and bosses keep only a quarter of control effects. Nightmare: no pause, bosses ignore control, and some attacks have only one escape.
5. The road begins: the narrator sets out the story over the first scenery, and a card shows your hero's two starting spells (a tap spell and a held channel) and the dodge keys. Press Ready to start.

A campaign

Thirty-one sceneries along one road north, with a boss at every other one from the third to the last. Ordinary sceneries are a walk through several small fights; a boss scenery is a single fight. After each scenery the results screen shows every player's damage, hits taken and downs, and you spend one talent point. After a boss, each player also drafts one spell from four cards. Health resets at every scenery. If everyone goes down, the fight is lost and can be retried.