Table of War

The game

About Table of War

YOU COMMAND THE ARMY, NOT A HERO

Most deckbuilders hand you one fighter and a stack of verbs. Table of War hands you a company.

Your units move and fight on their own action points - walk them, flank them, hold a ridge with them, no card required. The deck sits on top of that as your command channel: reinforcements, ordnance, standing orders, structures, and the fuel for your general's signature power. Two systems, two jobs. The board is the tactics. The deck is the strategy.

EVERY SOLDIER HAS A NAME

Your roster is persistent and it is permanent. Troops carry their name, rank, experience and scars from battle to battle, promote through a branch-specific rank ladder, and earn permanent perks at camps.

They do not come back. A rifleman you have carried since Act 1 - three promotions, a medal, a nickname you gave him yourself - dies to one badly-read artillery arc, and the next battle starts without him. The run economy is built around that: survivors carry forward, salvage buys what you can afford to replace, and every reckless push is a decision about who you can stand to lose.

THE BOARD FIGHTS BACK

Battles are fought on procedurally generated, non-rectangular maps - eight silhouettes carved out of void, so no two fronts have the same shape.

• Zones of control - you cannot sprint past an armed enemy. Lines have to be broken, not dodged.
• Flanking - a second body adjacent to the target, not to you. Positioning is a two-unit problem.
• Fog of war - with a movement rule that stops you sleepwalking into the dark.
• Terrain and cover - forest, hills, water and rock; some of it carveable, most of it not.
• Environmental hazards - inferno, toxic, mire and EMP fields, plus drifting storms that wander the board and hurt whoever is standing in them. Including the enemy. There is a whole pacifist toolkit built on that fact.
• Friendly fire - artillery splashes. It does not check whose uniform it is landing on.
• Objectives that are not "kill everything" - survive N turns, hold a position under contest.
• Raiders - a fast thief that crashes a skirmish, grabs your salvage and runs for the map edge. Kill it before it gets there or the money is gone for good.

And you can see it coming. Enemy intent is telegraphed on your turn: ghosted enemy positions, projected attack arrows, damage numbers, and a two-tier danger overlay separating "they can reach here" from "they can shoot you from here" - all of it updating live as you move. Turn it on, turn any layer of it off, play it blind if you want the fear.

THREE COMMANDERS, THREE DIFFERENT GAMES

• The Warlord - cheap reinforcements and a Wrath gauge that fills on every kill and every loss. Spend it on Rally the Horde: two free riflemen, deployed at the front, right now.
• The Engineer - the first structure each turn is free, and adjacent power plants charge a gauge that fires Overcharge: every turret double-fires, command points surge, damage repairs.
• The Nomad - the HQ is a vehicle. There is no fixed base to defend because there is no fixed base. Movement builds Momentum; spend it on Break Camp and the whole army acts again.

Each brings its own starting army, deck skew, and around thirty exclusive cards nobody else can draft.

From the developer

In the creator's own words.

From the Steam page's AI disclosure: "A one-person, AI-native production: I designed, directed and play-tested the entire game while AI systems handled the production work across code, art, animation, music and sound. Same iterative process a game designer takes with a team - though my team was AI agents."