This elegant UI is useful when playing Pawnbarian's free version, but is an essential element in allowing for the full version of the game to contain all of the complicating features (including additional character classes, difficulty modes, and dungeons) you gain access to after a single $ 6.99 purchase. Even when stacking on mechanics like cantrips, poisoned squares, and a customization system for adding shields, increased range, and other unique properties to your chess-piece cards, your bird's eye view of the action gives you all of the information you need to anticipate, read, and react to situations regardless of how hairy they get.

Using cards to make chess moves against enemies that follow their own unique rulesets sounds complicated, but Pawnbarian puts these pieces together so elegantly that everything feels intuitive. After selecting two cards to conduct moves and attacks, your enemies then take their turns where they make their attacks and move about the board. If you happen to move onto a space with an enemy on it, you defeat them. For example, if you select a card with a knight piece on it, you can move in the unique L-shape of a knight in chess. These cards primarily consist of chess piece icons, and the icon on the card dictates how you can move across the board. To do this, you pick cards from your hand to move and attack. Your hero character appears on this board facing up against all manner of enemy creatures, and your goal on each floor is to defeat these foes in as few turns as possible to maximize rewards you spend on upgrades before facing off against a final boss. Pawnbarian throws you into dungeons comprised of tiny floors fashioned after a quarter of a chess board (i.e. This game mixes chess with deck-building, and serves this combination up with a huge amount of variety that all but ensures it will stay on your phone as a go-to game for a good, long time. Just when I feel like I've seen every ingenious variation on the roguelike dungeon-crawler, games like Pawnbarian come along and surprise me all over again.

Pawnbarian release date