Aspect Arena

You buy the army. You do not fight it.

Each round the shelf offers three fighters and three weapons. You buy what the levy covers, hang a weapon on a body, order six slots, and send them. The siege is resolved before you see it and then played back: sixty seconds, sudden death at thirty, at one, two or three times speed. There is no skip, and nothing to press once it starts.

Fifteen wins takes a campaign, and a loss takes none of them back

A loss costs wall instead. Your castle starts at 5,000 and carries its damage from round to round, won or lost, while the enemy's is rebuilt to full every time. Repair buys 500 back for 120 gold, which is two fighters you will now not muster. No round can take more than a quarter of your maximum, and across 6,215 measured rounds, 95.2 per cent of losses took exactly that.

An Aspect is not a perk

Three of the ten are offered at the start, less what your last two finished runs spent. An Aspect decides what your army does with the openings it already has: Pyre sets your blows alight, Void executes the wounded, Aegis pays back what it blocks. Feed it and it tiers twice, and at the top you may hire its champion, one to a run, who arrives with an ultimate no shop sells. Hold two Aspects, each banking a quarter of the experience, and the pair always fuses: fifteen of the forty-five pairings have a name of their own, written twice, so which you took first matters.

Three of a kind, and what falls out of it

Four characters ever reach the shelf, knight, ranger, enchanter and mechanic, with eight weapons to start and four more forged by challenges. Grades are rolled when the shelf stocks, so the card shows the true price before you commit. Three copies at one grade fold into the next, five grades deep to Mythic, and a weapon that folds drops a chest of two charms out of fifty as well. Charms come through no other door. A reroll costs 20, and 20 more each time you do it again that round.

Two holes in your own wall

The masons cut up to two mountings, 30 gold then 60, and the gun to fill one costs 50 to 60 more: a Wall Cannon, a Keeper's Brazier, a Lavastorm Obelisk. Your Aspect's power runs through their fire as it runs through a sword. They reach two thirds of the field, so soldiers still decide a siege, and on the harder rungs the enemy arms its wall too.

The caravan deals in rule-breakers

Every second round, or every round under Tempest, the caravan parks one of thirty-six relics on the shelf at 80 gold, yours for the rest of that run. The Hungry Gate eats the first two attackers to reach it. The Cracked Bell refuses, once, to let the keep fall. The Turncoat Shroud turns every sixth corpse to your side, where it fell.

The enemy learns nothing, and does not need to

One rival Aspect comes out of the run's seed and holds every round but each third, when a challenger visits instead. It keeps no economy and adapts to nothing; its strength is the round number. The harder rungs do not make it cleverer, they make it richer: charms and a wall gun at Hard, relics at Very hard, and at Extreme one more body than you are allowed to field. Easy and Normal are open, and every rung above wants a won run on the one below. Over 600 automated runs a rung, the tuning bots won 47.7, 27.7, 11.8, 2.2 and 0.0 per cent.

The dragon does not die

Win a campaign and it is offered, once. It holds 9,999,999 hit points against a ninety second fight, so nobody has killed it and nobody will. You leave with the number you took off it, and 100,000 of that forges a weapon onto your profile for good.

What you are buying

Single player, offline, Windows. The demo is this same campaign with nothing held back, not an Aspect, a rung, a relic or a challenge. The full game adds Ranked, which pins the campaign to Normal and rates it across quarterly seasons, and a sandbox for setting two Aspects and a seed against each other.