Pawnbarian
Release date: Sep 24, 2021
Developers: j4nw
Genres: Indie, Strategy
Categories: Single-player, Steam Achievements, Full controller support, Steam Trading Cards, Steam Cloud, Remote Play on Phone, Remote Play on Tablet, Remote Play on TV, Family Sharing
Supported languages: English, Polish, French, Portuguese - Brazil, Spanish - Spain, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Swedish, Italian, Japanese, Danish, Hungarian, Korean, Russian, Bulgarian, Finnish, Serbian, Spanish - Latin America, Ukrainian

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! 

Press reviews: “A tiny and mighty game.” Rock Paper Shotgun “It’s a simple looking, but very addictive game that does a great job of channelling the classic strategic gameplay of Chess into a roguelike dungeon crawling format.” Alpha Beta Gamer “The depth of strategy and decision room in what is truly a rather tiny game is what’s important here. I think a great way to describe it would be in terms of ‘density’, as in how much is packed into the relative size of the experience. In which case, what we have here is a neutron star.” DarkZero