ArcoMage

Everything on this site so far has been art and renders. Here's the other half: the physical game, printed and sitting on the workshop floor.

That's the real 11 x 17 mounted board - the full ouroboros battlefield, every hex - and the leather-bound spellbook with the gold corner emboss. No CG, no mockup. We hold these, we play on these, and we fix what doesn't feel right in the hand.

This is what the campaign delivers: a real object on your table, not a promise.

Walls have come to the battlefield. Until now, the hex board between the two wizards was open ground — a straight sprint from one tower to the other. No longer. A whole family of wall and field spells can now carve that board apart: seal a lane in humming energy, raise a wall of stone your enemy has to smash through, or lay down a strip of fire that punishes anything foolish enough to cross it.

Two kinds of wall

The solid walls physically block the board. Nothing walks through them, and nothing flies over them either — a wall is a wall.

• Wall of Stone (Circle III, Common) — raise three tiles of stone in a line. It is cheap, it is early, and it is breakable: each block is Destructible Terrain with its own health. Your foe can march a creature up and batter a hole through it — but until they do, the lane is shut. It crumbles on its own after three turns.
• Energy Field (Circle VII, Rare) — the wizard-tier wall. A humming barrier of pure energy that cannot be attacked and cannot be flown over. It lasts a number of turns equal to your Intelligence when you cast it — so the smarter the mage, the longer the world stays divided.

You choose which way it runs

Here is the part we are proud of. A wall does not just appear — you aim it. As you hover the board, the wall pivots under your cursor: point one way for a wall running top-left to bottom-right, another for bottom-left to top-right, or straight up-and-down for a flat face staring your opponent down. A ghostly preview shows exactly where every block will land before you commit, and your cursor itself becomes the wall you are about to build.

And three ways to make the ground itself dangerous

Not every barrier stops a creature — some just make crossing a very bad idea. Fields stay walkable, but woe to whatever steps in:

• Fire Field (Circle IV, Uncommon) — a line of flame. Any creature that enters it, or begins its turn standing in it, takes 3 damage. Walk your enemy through your own fire, or wall off a lane with pain.
• Paralyze Field (Circle VI, Rare) — a shimmer of stasis across three tiles. Step in and you are frozen solid for two turns — no moving, no attacking. A rational creature simply refuses to enter, which makes it a soft wall of its own.
• Poison Field (Circle V, Uncommon) — a creeping venom that sickens every enemy creature on the board, draining them a little at the start of each of their turns until they are cured.

Why a wall wins games

A wall is tempo. Drop Energy Field across the only lane your opponent has creatures in, and those creatures spend two or three turns walking the long way around while your tower climbs. Wall of Stone for three mana can stall a game-ending charge long enough to draw your answer. Fire Field turns a chokepoint into a toll booth. And because Energy Field scales with Intelligence, a mage who has been quietly stacking Int can slam the door for five, six turns — an eternity in a duel.

Angle matters too. Aim a wall to seal the gap beside the central Nexus and you can funnel every attacker into a single tile — right where your Fire Field is waiting.

No wall is forever

Every barrier has an answer, and knowing them is half the game:

• Dispel Field unmakes any wall or field on the board outright — pick a tile, and the whole thing is gone. The classic Dispel can clear one as well.
• Smash it. Wall of Stone is Destructible Terrain — walk an adjacent creature up and attack a block. Enough hits and it crumbles into a breach, exactly where you chose to break through. (Note: stone is terrain, not a creature — effects that sacrifice or destroy creatures cannot touch it.)
• Wait it out. Fields fade on their own. Energy Field ticks down with the caster's turns; the hazard fields burn out after a few rounds.

The wall system is live now. Log in, raise one, and see how different the board feels when you get to decide where the lanes are. The five card illustrations are below — click to view them full size.

Two finalists, one card. The illustration for Graves of the Innocent — the spell that raises 1 ghost per turn — has come down to two renders. They are labeled only graves1 and graves2: no artists named, no hints, no lobbying. Judge the art, not the byline.

graves1

graves2

Which one goes to print? Cast your vote on the forum or in the Discord.

The digital character sheet is done. Everything you need to run a game of ArcoMage now lives in one page: your Tower, Wall, Moat, Intelligence, Mana and Life on real rolling 3D dice, full worker assignment, all 38 status effects with live duration counters, and the turn timer - the whole board state, tracked for you.

No bag of dice required. That is the whole point: you can play ArcoMage on the go. Away from the table, on a bus, waiting on the printed set to ship - pull it up on your phone and play a full game with nothing but the screen. It even ships with themed dice skins (parchment, slate and gold) and stamps the ArcoMage ouroboros on every rolled zero.

The dice are in hand. Custom d10s - black glitter body, gold embossed numbers, and the ArcoMage ouroboros. Real object, real gold, not a render. The d20s and d6s in the matching finish are inbound.

Next to the drawstring bag, this is the tactile side of the box coming together. This exact black-glitter, gold-on-die finish is the quality bar we are sending to the manufacturers.

The dice bag sample arrived. This is the first physical sample of the ArcoMage drawstring bag - the one that holds your dice and tokens - and it came out sharp.

Black velvet body, a gold ouroboros crest and ARCOMAGE wordmark on the face, and a gold drawstring cord with a toggle. No render - a real object we can hold, and the quality bar we are sending manufacturers to match at campaign scale.

The character sheet just went from file to object. Printed, both sides, and laminated as a dry-erase surface - the sheet every player keeps beside the board to track their kingdom at a glance.

Front: the full tracker - Core Resources with the die slots, Worker Assignment, and all 38 Status Effect medallions. Back: a parchment note-field with the gold border and ouroboros for wipe-clean notes.

Design render first, then the real laminated print - front and back. It holds up in the hand.

The player character sheet is finished. This is the A5, print-both-sides, laminated sheet every player keeps beside the board to track their kingdom at a glance.

Three sections, all hand-built: Core Resources (Tower, Wall, Moat, Intelligence, Mana, Life), Worker Assignment (defenders, altar, mage tower, quarry), and the full Status Effects grid - all 38 conditions, from Poisoned to Stone Form, each with its own illustrated medallion.

Every icon, every label, every gold frame was placed by hand - no template, no shortcut. It's done, it's engine-accurate, and it's off to print with the board.

The game board is finalized. Every hex, every creature, and every inch of the ouroboros battlefield is locked. No more changes — this is the board that ships.

And we have taken the next step: quotes are out to manufacturers. The final production files are in the hands of printing partners right now for bids, which puts a real, mass-produced board on the horizon.

Want to see the craftsmanship up close? Here are two detail shots — and below, the entire board sliced into 15 sections. Hover any section to zoom in, click to open it full-screen and inspect the art hex by hex.

Download the full-resolution board (ZIP, ~57 MB)

Here's the kind of thing we quietly fix every day. Blade Spirits is a ring of orbiting blades that sweeps the hexes around it. In the old build the ring picked its rotation — clockwise or counter-clockwise — at random. It looked cool, but it broke a promise: in ArcoMage, outcomes come from decisions, not dice.

Which way the blades turn decides which adjacent enemy gets hit first, and against two targets that's the whole play. Leaving it to a coin flip meant a perfect setup could still whiff. So we killed it: the spin is now deterministic and readable, and we re-rendered the icon in both orientations so the animation, the token, and the card all agree. Minor for us — an afternoon. But it's the difference between magic that happens to you and a spell you can aim.

You don't have to wait for the campaign to play the tabletop version. We just posted a free Print & Play pack with the real production files: the full 11 x 17 mounted board at print resolution, the punchboard token sheet, blank hex-tile templates (30mm and 25mm), and the complete current rulebook.

Print the board, punch the tokens onto cardstock, grab a couple of dice as counters, and you're dueling tonight. Card sheets and character pages drop into the same pack next week.

Download the Print & Play (.zip)

Print-resolution files, ~70 MB. Personal use only.

No mystery-meat mechanics here. The complete tabletop rulebook is online as a clean PDF you can read start to finish — turns, the two-lane board and Zone of Control, summoning and keywords, the Moat/Wall/Tower cascade, conditions, wizard Forms, and best-of-three sideboarding. If you've ever backed a game and only found out how it played after it arrived, this is the opposite of that.

Read the Rulebook (PDF)

People ask why ArcoMage has a board at all — isn't it a card game? The board is what makes position matter, and yes, it's all written in the rulebook (sections 2.1 and 8.2).

Two tiles in the dead center are the Nexus: impassable rock. Because they plug the middle, the field splits into an upper lane and a lower lane. Any creature crossing has to commit to one. If you've played League or Dota, the model is instant: hold a lane, threaten a lane, punish an over-committed lane.

And critically — you can't just run past a blocker. Every creature exerts a Zone of Control over the six hexes around it. Step next to an enemy and you move at most one hex that turn. You can slip by, but one tile at a time, which gives the guard a chance to trade. One well-placed blocker can hold an entire lane — exactly like a body-block at a choke. That's the whole reason summons have Speed, Flying, and Shade: they're answers to the lane problem.

Two things landed in the client this week that you feel more than notice. First, attack-move: hold the key, click a hex, and your piece advances but automatically commits to a fight if an enemy is in reach along the way — no more clicking one hex short and eating a free hit.

Second, custom cursors. The pointer changes to match what you're doing: an open hand to select, a sword over a legal attack, a sparkle when a spell can target the hex, a red X when it can't. You stop mis-clicking because the cursor tells you the rule before you commit.

Hard to explain, easy to watch. Here's a full turn in the online client — collect income, cast from your open book, move a creature into a lane, resolve combat, pass. No shuffling, no drawing, no waiting on a hand. Your whole book is in front of you the entire time.

Small component, real design decision. Because your entire spellbook is open every turn, there's a temptation to solve the whole board like a chess problem on every single turn. The timer is a gentle governor — and here's the online version, the Silent Hourglass, actually running:

Set it to casual, standard, or blitz. It's a warning, not a guillotine — running low nudges you to move, it doesn't instantly lose. But it keeps a best-of-three to a crisp length instead of a two-hour stare-down. The physical box ships with a real sand timer for the same reason.

Let's be clear about what these are for, because in a game that brags about no luck, dice raise an eyebrow. They're counter dice, not luck dice — you never roll them for a random outcome. They're an elegant way to track the numbers that climb during a duel (Life, Mana, Tower, Wall) without a fistful of cubes sliding around.

Each player gets a custom-faced set, readable across the table. We added a few more after playtests showed values climbing higher than planned — a good problem.

It's not just creatures. Every building (Tower, Wall, Moat, Quarry, Mage Tower, Altar, Graveyard), every worker state, every resource, and every status effect in the game has its own hand-drawn icon so the board reads at a glance — on the table and in the client. Here's the current UI icon set:

This is the whole thing, minus the rulebook and character sheets: a full boxed game. A custom mounted 11x17 board, the leather spellbook binder, custom counter dice, a punchboard token set, cloth bags, a sand timer, and the box. Everything below is a real production render from the files we're quoting to manufacturers right now.

Seeing it all together for the first time made it real: this isn't a mockup anymore, it's a bill of materials. Want the full component spec — every size, quantity, and finish we sent to the factories? Read the whole manufacturing RFQ here.

Every ghost has Shade — it can't be blocked by a normal defender. The Vengeful Spirit is the payoff card: summon it and it commits to a lane and phases straight through whatever's parked in the way. The only answers are a flyer, a Nightsighted defender, or removing it before it lands.

The single component we're proudest of. In ArcoMage your spellbook is literally a book — a premium A5 six-ring leather binder that holds your spell pages so you can build your 8x8 main book and 16-spell sideboard, then swap pages one-for-one between games of a best-of-three. It feels like preparing a grimoire, because that's exactly what you're doing.

We're sourcing it separately from the rest of the game so we can get the leather and ring mechanism right. RFQs went out to specialist binders this week; foil and deboss options are on the table for higher tiers.

Forms are wizard self-transformations: you stop being a squishy caster and become something with a body, a Speed, and a new rule set. Lich Form is the necromancer's bargain — you gain undead resilience and lane presence, at a cost. Watch it land:

The play surface is built from modular hexes, and every creature you summon and every condition you inflict gets a physical punchboard token. The token is the kind of thing; where it sits on the grid is the specific instance. That's how a card game keeps a clean board state you can read at a glance.

This week: the punch layout — roughly twenty creature designs, fifteen condition markers in two sizes, scrap markers, and blanks, around 250-300 tokens across a handful of steel-rule sheets. Punchboard came in cheaper than we feared, which means more tokens in the base box.

Another Form, another playstyle. Wraith Form turns the wizard into a fast, evasive threat that reads the lanes differently than a bruiser would. Great for punishing an over-extended guard.

Back at the Founder tier and you get more than a copy of the game — you get the Founder chest: your permanent portrait, an exclusive medallion frame, beta access ~3 months early, and a founder-only cosmetic set. Here's the chest opening animation from the client:

Big one. The board is finished art now — a mounted 11 x 17 bi-fold, the size that fits the hex grid, the two lanes, the central Nexus, and both wizards' tower stacks without cramping. It folds to fit the box and opens to a table-filling battlefield.

This is the piece everything else keys off: token sizes, mini scale, punchboard layout, and the manufacturing quote all depend on the board's final dimensions. Locking it unblocked the entire physical production track.

Every threat needs an answer, or the game is solved. Exorcism is the counter to a ghost rush — it reaches into a lane and banishes an unblockable Shade before it connects. This is the data-layer balance loop in action: we saw Shades over-perform in self-play, so the book got a clean, on-theme answer instead of a nerf.

Everything we've been building in cardboard, actually being played. This is a tabletop turn on the real board with punch tokens and counter dice — the same rules as the client, in your hands.

Not every spell is a haymaker. Summon Hollow Locket is an engine piece — it banks value over several turns and rewards a patient book. The kind of card that quietly wins games two turns before your opponent notices.

Small but real: our X account is live and verified. It's the fastest place to catch the daily dev drips — a new spell animation, a rules clarification, a component render — between the longer write-ups here. Verification also means nobody can spin up a fake ArcoMage account and phish backers, which matters more the closer we get to the campaign.

When you cast a summon in ArcoMage it isn't a stat line — it's a body on the field with a hex it stands on and a lane it guards. So every creature gets its own hex token, and we draw them a few a day: ember sprites, blade spirits, clockwork chimeras, basalt wyverns, azure leviathans, frostbound colossi, all the way up to the dragons. Each is oriented to face into the board, reads at token size and full card size, and matches its card art exactly. Here's the full token set as it stands — this wall gets a little longer every single day:

One of our favorite showpieces. Hallows' Eve is a board-wide event that shifts the rules for a turn and lets a necromancer's whole lane surge at once. Pure spectacle, and a real tempo swing.

We put up the ArcoMage Facebook page so the folks who live there don't have to hunt. Same drip as everywhere else: dev updates, art reveals, and campaign news. Between Facebook, X, Discord, Telegram, the forum, and this feed, wherever you already are, we're there too.

One of the three hardest problems in ArcoMage was never the art or the netcode — it was balance. A game with a few hundred hand-written spells has an astronomical number of interactions, and no human team can playtest them all. So we built an opponent that plays the game against itself, millions of times, with no graphics and no waiting.

This week it crossed a threshold: the current neural-net snapshot now reliably beats its own older versions in headless self-play. The same engine that makes a tough single-player opponent is the engine that auto-balances every spell. When a card is too strong, the AI finds and exploits it long before a human would — and because every spell is data, not code, rebalancing is a one-line change the AI proposes.

Translation: ArcoMage gets more balanced the more it's played, not less. No power-creep, no dead cards, no banned list.

Recycling Center is a resource engine for the patient player — it converts spent and scrapped pieces back into mana and material. Not flashy, but it's the backbone of the control archetype the AI keeps finding in self-play.

The full pool of Founder Portraits is finished — two dozen wizards spanning every school of magic, every walk of life, every temperament from hopeful apprentice to grim necromancer. Back at the Founder tier and one becomes your permanent in-game avatar, shown in the lobby, in-match, and on your forum profile. Each was painted in our house style and hand-cleaned for transparency. Pick your favorite — you'll claim it at checkout:

Safety Deposit Box lets you stash value and pull it out on your terms — a flexible tempo tool that rewards reading the board a turn ahead. Little animations like this are how we pressure-test that a card's feel matches its rules text.

Both our Discord server and Telegram channel are live. That's where the campaign breathes: daily dev updates, spell-design brainstorms (some already in the book), playtest sign-ups, and first dibs on beta keys ~3 months before public launch. Come argue about whether Twin Cast is busted. The troll doesn't bite. Much.

Wraithbone Hollow is a structure card — it plants in a lane and generates undead pressure over time, turning a quiet flank into a slow, grinding threat you have to answer.

Discord is great for chatter, but strategy deserves permanence. forum.arcomage.org is live for deck-and-book theory, spell-balance arguments, bug reports, and guides that don't scroll away in an hour. Your forum profile even carries your rank medallion.

Life or Death is a swing spell that puts real pressure on a read — get it right and you flip the duel, get it wrong and you've spent your turn. This is one of the earliest alpha animations, and it's aged well.

The heart of the game: hundreds of spells, nine schools across nine circles of power, each with original hand-painted art sitting on a strict data layer. Every spell's cost, targets, and effect are data, not code — which is what lets the self-play AI rebalance a card with a one-line change and why the game gets fairer the more it's played. A sample of the current book:

The elevator version. Here's our first pass at the campaign pitch — the no-luck hook, the open spellbook, the two-lane board, and the self-balancing AI, in about ninety seconds.

ArcoMage isn't only ranked duels. There's a single-player campaign — a series of scripted opponents and set-piece boards that teach the game and tell a story. Here's the opening beat of level one, the wizard arriving:

ArcoMage is better with a crew. We're building guilds — claim a guild stone, recruit, and climb a shared ladder — and a tournament system with sign-ups and brackets. Here's the guild-stone reveal:

Climbing the ladder should leave a mark. Ranked seasons hand out trophies that live on your profile shelf — here's one materializing. Cosmetic, permanent, and a nice flex on your forum card.

Ranked is in: five tiers from Bronze to Diamond, each with a hand-made medallion that rides with you everywhere — the client lobby, the in-match HUD, and your forum profile. Win ranked duels to rise; your medallion is the same object in all three places, so your rank is always visible and always yours.

Honest dev note: we set the site and accounts up once, didn't love how fragmented it felt, and rebuilt it. Now sign-in, rank, portrait, and profile are a single identity shared across the client, the forum, and the store — one account, everywhere. Less glamorous than a dragon, but it's the plumbing the whole campaign runs on.

The foundational call. Every spell in ArcoMage — its cost, its targets, its effect, its conditions — is defined as data, not buried in code. That one decision is why the self-play AI can rebalance a card with a one-line change, why we can add cards daily without a rebuild, and why a spell's art, token, and rules text never drift apart. Boring to write about, load-bearing for the entire project.

Where it started. The first playable build went live at play.arcomage.org — a real duel, in your browser, free, no download. Rough around the edges then, sharper every week since. This is the anchor everything else builds on: a game you can actually play today, not a promise.