Conjurers

My spreadsheet instincts fired up the moment I realized the core loop here is essentially a snowball economy: beat an opponent, permanently absorb their creature cards, grow a hybrid army no single Conjurer was designed to field. That is a clean, compelling design decision that holds the whole experience together. Eight rival Conjurers each anchor a distinct creature type, Prowlers, Winged Beasts, Serpents, Polypods, and more, and every win peels away their roster and grafts it onto yours. The hybrid crafting on top of that is where the build variety opens up. A Hoofed-Human fusion produces a Minotaur, a Polypod-Prowler becomes a Manticore, a Winged-Lizard gives rise to a Dragon. These aren't cosmetic swaps: different types bring different tactical roles, and building around their synergies is where the game's actual depth lives. Terrain does a lot of heavy lifting in combat and the system earns its complexity. High ground, Mana Towers, and battlefield hazards genuinely alter movement and power values, so the correct play is almost never just "summon the biggest creature." Positioning matters before a card is even played, which means each fight reads more like a grid-based puzzle with variable pieces than a stat race. The AI has five difficulty levels and the top tier, by the developer's own acknowledgment, tracks card order and creature priority with genuine calculation. Whether it cheats or actually thinks that hard is hard to confirm with only a handful of early reviews in, but the intent is clearly to pressure experienced players rather than just front-load numbers. For newcomers worried about the deckbuilding-plus-tactics combination, there is a legitimate onboarding argument here. The tutorial walks through the rules in roughly ten minutes, which is honest on the low end for this genre, and three structured boss fights serve as a gauntlet before the wider campaign opens. The "Save Anytime" feature and the accessibility options, color alternatives, keyboard-only, mouse-only, no timed inputs, suggest Treadway thought about the barrier to entry, not just the ceiling. That said, the review sample is tiny at four users, so community-confirmed difficulty curves and late-game balance are still an open question. PvP is listed as a mode and Steam Leaderboards are live, but competitive viability is untested at this player count. Being a solo-developer title released just weeks ago, the rough edges to watch are the ones that don't show up in trailers: edge-case AI behaviour at mid-difficulty, whether the creature roster of 60 stays meaningfully differentiated into the back half, and how much replay value the level editor and PvP actually add once the single-player campaign is exhausted. The foundation, though, is genuinely solid. The design language is classical tactics with a creature-collection spine that rewards patient, build-aware play over grinding. If you like knowing exactly why you lost a fight, this gives you the tools to figure that out.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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