War of Fantasia

Patch Notes

What changed in War of Fantasia, newest first — every release since the game opened.

What changed, newest first. The reasoning behind each change is in `DECISIONS.md`.

Beta v5.0 — A new bot

8 October 2026

• A new bot at every difficulty. It has one way of playing — it counters what is coming, builds its economy and sends — and the harder levels play it more carefully. Bots no longer get bonus gold.
• Round 1 has a Ready button, and Space does the same: start the first wave early, against a bot or online.
• The title screen now says “Press to Play”.

Beta v4.9 — Five more languages

5 October 2026

• Five more languages under Settings › Language › Other Languages: 简体中文, 繁體中文, हिन्दी, বাংলা and ไทย — thirty in all.
• Chinese comes in both Simplified and Traditional characters, each set in typefaces of its own, as are Hindi, Bengali and Thai.

Beta v4.8 — Five more languages

5 October 2026

• Five more languages under Settings › Language › Other Languages: Deutsch, Filipino, Tiếng Việt, 日本語 and 한국어 — twenty-five in all.
• Japanese and Korean are the game's first in East Asian scripts. Each is set in typefaces of its own, and lines break where those languages break them: Korean between words, Japanese never before a closing mark.
• In every language: the splash line of a fighter's tooltip is translated (it said “at” in English), an armor type's symbol no longer wraps away from its word, and the Essence Wars clock keeps its whole width when the top bar is crowded.

Beta v4.7 — Five more languages

4 October 2026

• Five more languages under Settings › Language › Other Languages: Български, Dansk, Polski, Русский and Српски — twenty in all.
• In the Selected window, prices are drawn with the gold coin, as everywhere else, instead of an English “g”.

Beta v4.6 — Eight more languages

4 October 2026

• Eight more languages under Settings › Language › Other Languages: Čeština, Hrvatski, Bahasa Indonesia, Nederlands, Norsk, Svenska, Türkçe and Українська — fifteen in all. Ukrainian is the game's first in Cyrillic, set in a typeface of its own.

Beta v4.5 — Five new languages

4 October 2026

• War of Fantasia now speaks French, Italian, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil) and Romanian, alongside English and Spanish. Choose one under Settings › Language › Other Languages, where each is listed with its flag and its name in its own words. A browser already set to one of them opens the game in it the first time.
• Everything in the game is translated — menus, matches, tooltips, World Info, the tour and Essence Wars — except the patch notes from before this release, which stay in English. If anything reads wrong, tell us with Send feedback. More languages are on the way.

Beta v4.4a — How to Play Essence Wars, and portals that face their Kings

3 October 2026

• Essence Wars has its own How to Play: choosing a house, building with Mana Essence, the three arenas of a round, how every house is paid, the two events, the knockout and the keys. It opens over the house picker the first time you play the mode, and is always there from How to Play at the top of the picker, from Pause, and from How to Play on the main menu.
• Each portal's mouth now looks straight down the lane at its King: nine o'clock at your end, three o'clock at your opponent's. From the usual camera you see it nearly side-on; turn the camera with Q and E to look into it.
• Fixed: in Essence Wars' top bar, the house you face lost the word Opener under its name, and a long house name was cut short.

Beta v4.4 — Easier to read, easier to play

3 October 2026

• Text across the game is larger and easier to read: labels in plain sentence case rather than small capitals, the decorative lettering kept for titles, helper text brighter, and no label under 12 pixels.
• The top bar reads in order of importance: Gold, Essence, Essence a second, income and the two armies on the left; on the right the wave and one labeled timer — "Build phase 1:15", "Wave in progress", "Duel" — with its bar draining underneath. The match clock moved to the Pause screen.
• Barracks is a list: one row per mercenary with its portrait, its aura, its Essence price and the income it adds, grouped into price tiers, and a "more sends" count at the bottom while there are more below.
• Picking a card shows the fighter standing on the cell under the pointer, with its price, before you click. Where it can't go, the cell turns red and says why: outside your grid, cell taken, not enough gold, or only between waves. Ctrl+Z (⌘Z on a Mac) takes back the last fighter you placed this build phase with every coin refunded; press it again to go further back.
• Escape closes one thing at a time — a tooltip, the Selected window, the Performance panel, the card you picked — and pauses only when nothing is left open. The Performance panel has a close button. The Selected window shows all of a fighter's stats in two columns without scrolling, with the keys for Upgrade, Move and Sell on their buttons, and a price you can't pay says how much more you need.
• Pause shows the wave and the match time, then Resume, Settings… and How to Play…, with Leave Match… and Quit Game… set apart in red. Leaving now asks first and says what it costs: a loss marked Abandoned, or nothing on your record if the first wave has not resolved.
• One Settings window, from Pause or from the menu's Options: Sound, Display, Controls, Accessibility and Language. New in it: full screen; the card keys 1 to 5 and the Hero's key can be changed, like Upgrade, Sell and Move; text size up to 200%; reduced motion, or follow your system; dimmer flashes; color-blind friendly colors, orange and blue in place of red and green; and each card's key at the end of its tooltip.
• In the menus, Back is always at the top left, and Esc does the same. Without a name, the Hall of Champions takes you to choose one. Bot difficulty is one row of four choices. The end of a match leads with Play Again (Enter), explains a Domination, lays the stats out as a table and keeps feedback under "Tell us what happened". World Info has a search, and its sidebar follows where you are. The guided tour's steps are shorter, it shows how far along you are, and you place your first fighter yourself.

Beta v4.3c — The King, redrawn

3 October 2026

• The King has new art in all three of his states, standing, wounded and down on one knee, in blue and in red, and every move he makes is redrawn to match: his breathing, the flinch when a monster reaches him, the brace as a wave starts, the rally after a clean wave, his watch during a duel and his fall. He stands in the middle of his platform now. The King skins keep their art for now.

Beta v4.3b — The rest of the new art

3 October 2026

• New art for all twenty Corrupted and Chaos wave monsters, both great Warlords included, with new portraits on the Incoming card, and for every unit skin: the Gilded Militia and Archer and the five Dawnwatch and five Brightwire Heroes. They move like the rest of the new roster, eight frames to a walk and idle, six to an attack and a death. Only the Kings keep their old art for now.

Beta v4.3a — One portal, and fair houses

3 October 2026

• One portal at each gate. The glowing rift in the floor and its two pillars are gone, the stone portal turns to face your King, and every wave walks out of it and fans out to its rows.
• Essence Wars: each house charges its own price, so every race has a fair chance. Animalia fighters cost a fifth more; Kieerah a fifth less, Aa'gar 15% less, Karseesh 10% less and Fantasians 5% less, promotions included. In the 1v1 nothing changes.

Beta v4.3 — Bigger waves, a bigger arena, a Warlord with an escort

2 October 2026

• Every wave brings 14 to 22 monsters: 20 Grunts, 22 Harriers, 18 Stingers, Ravagers and Hexlings, 16 Overseers, Gorehounds and Wraiths, 14 Bulwarks — and the same number in the Corrupted and Chaos tiers, whose monsters are stronger rather than more. Each one is weaker, sharing the wave's strength; from wave 4 a wave spread over more bodies hits a little harder for it, since its blows land across your whole army.
• Waves 10, 20 and 30 are one great Warlord, drawn larger, and seven seconds in its escort comes out of the portal: 6 Grunts at wave 10; 4 Corrupted Grunts and 2 Wraiths at 20; 3 Chaos Grunts, 2 Corrupted Wraiths and a Corrupted Bulwark at 30. The Incoming card lists them. The escort shares the boss wave's strength rather than adding to it, and a boss wave is still the hardest of its ten.
• The arena is bigger: 14 columns by 11 rows of cells, from 12 by 9, and a wave comes down the middle nine rows at its widest.
• Your army holds its cells until the wave reaches it. Shooters fire from where they stand; the moment a monster strikes one of your fighters, or one of yours strikes one up close, the whole army moves forward, each fighter taking the first enemy it meets. It holds again at the start of every wave.
• New art for the Militia, the five races and their Heroes, the ten first-tier wave monsters and the thirty mercenaries, with new portraits and icons and smoother animation. Corrupted and Chaos monsters, Hero skins and the Kings keep their old art until theirs is finished.

Beta v4.2c — Smaller Essence, Heroes that level

2 October 2026

• Mana Essence comes in a fifth as fast and everything it buys costs a fifth as much, so matches play as they did with smaller numbers. A Miner digs 0.05 Essence a second at level 0, up to 0.6 at level 10. Sends cost 10 to 100, and 125 to 320 for the Advanced ones; King upgrades 35, then 5 more a level; the Advanced Barracks 335; each reroll 40 more than the last; Sunstrider's Wish pays 135. You start with 10 Essence, still one Spawnling, and killing a send pays the same gold it did. The first Miner upgrade costs gold alone, then 5 Essence and later 10.
• Heroes level up like every other fighter, by what they do in a fight: a splash Hero by dealing damage, the others by dealing it and taking it. They still cannot be upgraded.
• Ranged fighters stuck behind their own front line walk round it when there is room, instead of shuffling in place.
• Anything you cannot afford is dimmed as well as priced in red — hand cards, sends, Miners and their upgrades, the King, the Barracks, rerolls, a fighter's upgrades and Move — and back to full the moment you can, in Essence Wars too. Miners in training show ×2, ×3 on the Miner card.
• The Performance tab is a wider tab in the arena's top-right corner instead of sitting on the frame, and the Selected window's × sits in the middle of its button. Leaving a match and starting another starts the music from the top.

Beta v4.2b — Into the arena

2 October 2026

• Every match now opens on a card showing both sides — your King and your opponent's, or in Essence Wars your house and the one you face — while the battlefield loads. Then the camera flies in: high over the whole battlefield, down across your opponent's side and the portals, and onto your own lane, with the interface fading in as it lands.
• Click or press any key to skip the flight. Bot matches and Essence Wars hold the clock until you have the board, so the opening costs no build time; a live match flies in faster. Turn it off under Options → Camera; it starts off if your system asks for reduced motion. In Essence Wars the camera now settles onto each new board instead of cutting to it.
• The portals stand up. Each wave's gate is a ring of stone on a plinth between two pillars, with a vortex turning inside it, turned toward you so it reads as standing from every camera angle. The rift on the floor is narrower now, the light the portal spills across the lane mouth. In duels the Kings stand a step further back, behind their gates.
• The King stands in the middle of his platform. He was placed by the middle of his picture, which was his left boot; he is placed by his body now, for every King and every skin.

Beta v4.2a — A game that always loads

2 October 2026

• If our server is slow or down, the game no longer sits on Loading… for ever: after a few seconds the menu opens, bot matches work, and your profile fills in when the server answers. If the game cannot start at all, the loading screen says so and offers a Reload button.
• A live match notices a dead connection within about ten seconds — after a Wi-Fi switch or waking a laptop — and reconnects on its own, waiting a little longer between tries so everyone does not rush the server at once.
• Phones and tablets no longer download the whole game just to be told it is made for a computer, and the game loads its files side by side instead of one after another.
• Signing out is instant, even when the server is slow to hear about it. One broken panel can no longer freeze the rest of the interface.

Beta v4.2 — Veterans, armor, and dearer Essence

1 October 2026

• Fighters level up. Each earns experience from the work its role does — damage dealt for DPS and Splash, damage taken for Tanks, both for Versatile — and reaches Level 1, 2 and 3 at 100, 250 and 500. Every level is +10% health, damage and armor, free and at once, and gold stripes over a fighter show where it is.
• A fighter can be upgraded only at Level 3, and the new tier starts again at Level 0. The Selected panel shows the level, the experience to the next one, and why an upgrade is locked. Heroes do not level up, and Essence Wars has no levels.
• The Performance tab, on the right edge of the battlefield, pulls out your fighters ranked by damage dealt or damage taken, for the last wave or the whole match. Click one to select it.
• Armor is a number as well as a type. Every unit has one, and it turns away Armor ÷ (Armor + 15) of each hit: Light 1, Medium 3, Heavy 5. Health was lowered to match, so fights last as long as they did, and every unit's health now ends in 0 or 5.
• Everything bought with Mana Essence costs about eight times as much: sends 50, 75, 100 and up to 1,600; King upgrades 175, then 25 more a level; the Advanced Barracks 1,675; each reroll 200 more than the last. Miner upgrades cost what they did, so Essence comes in as fast as before. You start with 50 Essence, one Spawnling as before, and killing a send pays the same gold it did. Sends are rarer and bigger, so matches run longer.

Beta v4.1i — A sturdier server

1 October 2026

• Invite codes are six letters now, so nobody can guess their way into a friend's match. Hosting, joining and quick match allow a dozen tries a minute, which you will never notice.
• The server holds up against floods that could have knocked it over: oversized orders, sign-in spam and connections that drop without a word. Nothing changes in how a match plays.
• If the server is too busy to check a finished match, the result screen says so instead of leaving it unrecorded without a reason.

Beta v4.1h — Ready, and one Options

30 September 2026

• Essence Wars has a Ready button, and Space does the same: no Essence comes in while you wait, so once you have spent it there is no reason to sit out the clock. The other houses build the moment the round starts.
• Essence Wars' Options is the 1v1's: Resume, every setting -- sound, soundtrack, interface size, fighter shortcuts, camera -- Leave match and Quit game. Opening it pauses the tournament, and Esc opens it when nothing is in your hand. The fighter shortcuts work here too: upgrade and sell the selected fighter.

Beta v4.1g — Essence Wars on the battlefield, and a lighter game

30 September 2026

• Essence Wars now plays on the same 3D battlefield as the 1v1. You build on your own island, with your King on his floating platform and the house you face next beside you, and every bout is fought on a duel arena of its own. The three arenas joined by walkways are gone.
• The two openers are fought at once, each on its own arena. You watch yours, then the other one while it is still going, and the rows under On the field switch between them. The winners meet on a fresh arena.
• Everything the 1v1 has, Essence Wars has: the camera you can move, the grid that lights up while you place, Shift+click to place several, and the houses' names over their Kings.
• The game is smaller. Its pictures are stored far more efficiently and look the same, about 180 MB down to about 60 MB; the music is a third smaller; and the Steam build leaves out the browser's own menus in languages the game does not speak.

Beta v4.1f — More squares, and Shift to place more

30 September 2026

• The board has two more rows: 12 columns by 9, 108 squares where there were 84. Nothing else moved. The columns, the march to the King, every fighter and every wave are as they were, and a wave still comes down the middle seven rows at its widest; the two new rows are room to build.
• A click places one fighter and puts its card down. Hold Shift as you click to keep the card up and place another, for as long as you can afford one.
• While a fighter is on your cursor the grid lights up: the lines turn gold and the free squares brighten, so you can see where it will stand.
• Fighters no longer look pixelated when they are drawn small, in a duel or with the camera pulled back: they are smoothed at every size.
• Buttons no longer make a sound when the pointer passes over them. They still click when pressed.

Beta v4.1e — A camera, and room to stand

30 September 2026

• You can move the camera. Right-drag or the arrow keys move it, the mouse wheel zooms toward the pointer, middle-drag or Q and E turn and tilt it, and Home puts it back. It starts over your own lane; pull the wheel back to see the whole battlefield. The controls are listed in Options.
• Every square on the grid is now bigger than the fighter standing in it, the biggest Hero included, so a full board no longer looks crowded. The grid itself and the rules are unchanged.

Beta v4.1d — Miners, Regen, and the arenas face each other

30 September 2026

• Miners dig a quarter of an Essence a second at level 0, a quarter more with each level up to 2.5 at level 9, and 3 at level 10. Upgrade prices are unchanged, and Deep Veins adds 1 Essence per Miner per second.
• Your Miners start digging when wave 1 starts, not during the first build phase.
• King Regen heals half as much: 0.7 health a level, rounded up, so 7 a wave at level 10 instead of 14.
• The two arenas face each other again: your island on the left, your opponent's on the right, the Kings at the outer ends and the gates facing across the middle.
• A Sending card above Incoming shows the mercenaries you have queued for your opponent's next wave, each with its own icon and how many. Each King's health bar shows its percentage.

Beta v4.1c — Made for PC

30 September 2026

• War of Fantasia is now made for computers only. On a phone or a tablet the site says so and links the guides: play in a browser on your computer, or wait for the Steam release.

Beta v4.1b — The battlefield in 3D

30 September 2026

• The battlefield is a 3D world under a tilted camera, with the fighters and monsters drawn as they always were. Each lane is an island, each gate a rift in the floor, and each King stands on a hovering platform under his name: yours, your opponent's, or the bot's difficulty.
• Every board is its own animated arena: the base board's storm sea under rain and lightning, Emberwake's lava, Nightglass under an aurora, Overgrowth's canopy and fireflies, Wintertide's snow, and a colosseum at sunset for the duel.

Beta v4.1a — The match screen, redrawn

30 September 2026

• The top bar is seven boxes of one size: Wave, Gold, Essence, Essence a second, Income, Army and Opponent, with the clocks beside Options. Music and sound effects are switched in Options. The Economy cards are just their prices; levels and rates are in their tooltips.
• Your hand is a bar of portraits at the foot of the battlefield, with the Hero and Reroll beside it; everything about a card is in its tooltip. The Barracks cards show each creature's face.
• Incoming sits bottom left, the fighter you select opens bottom right, and a Blessing of the Crown arrives as three cards to choose from or put aside for later.
• New art throughout: the King's hit, guard, rally, duel and fall, a hit effect for every damage type, a projectile for every ranged fighter, card frames by tier and portraits for every unit.

Beta v4.1 — Essence Wars

30 September 2026

• A second mode, Essence Wars: four Houses, three arenas, one champion. Build your army each round, watch it fight, and bank Essence toward the final. For now it is played against three bots.
• The one-on-one modes are now called WoF - 1v1 - Bots and WoF - 1v1 - PVP.

Beta v4.0s — One Miner to start

28 September 2026

• You start the match with one Miner instead of two, digging 1 Essence a second.

Beta v4.0r — The new Miner table

28 September 2026

• Miners dig whole Essence every second: 1 a second each at level 0, one more per level up to 10 at level 9, and 12 at level 10. Your two starting Miners dig 2 a second; twenty at level 10 dig 240. Miners now start at level 0.
• Miner upgrades have their own prices, level by level: 25 gold and 10 Essence for the first two, then 50 and 20, 75 and 30, 100 and 40, and 125 and 40 for the last two. Deep Veins now adds 4 Essence per Miner per second.
• Essence is far more plentiful than it was, and sends, King levels and rerolls still cost what they did. Their prices are next.

Beta v4.0q — The Hall of Champions

26 September 2026

• The leaderboard is now the Hall of Champions.

Beta v4.0p — The whole clock

26 September 2026

• The Ready button is gone. Your Miners pay Essence by the second, so ending a build phase early only ever paid you less; every build phase now runs its whole clock, for both players.
• The build phase before a duel is a full thirty seconds, like the one after it. It used to be half.

Beta v4.0o — Blessing fixes

25 September 2026

• Picking up a fighter to move it now puts a held Blessing card back, and holding a Blessing card puts a Move down: only one can be on the cursor. Before, a Blessing card and then Move could spend the Blessing on whichever fighter you clicked next. A blessed fighter's upgrade tooltip shows the health, damage and attack rate it will really have, and the help says that a fighter under Vetiti Foedus does not come back.

Beta v4.0n — Blessings for one fighter

24 September 2026

• Four new Blessings of the Crown, each laid on one fighter you choose. Mystic Potential Ascends it: +20% health, +20% damage, +10% attack speed and a golden aura. Vetiti Foedus gives it +50% damage, +25% attack speed and +25% health, but if it falls, in a wave or a duel, it never rises again. Court's Hassassin makes it the Executioner: each hit on a monster or mercenary at a quarter of its health or less has a one-in-ten chance to kill it outright, never a Warlord. Army Vanguard gives it half as much health again.
• Choosing one is two clicks: the card, then one of your fighters, which pulse while you choose. The chosen fighter keeps its Blessing through a promotion and wears a ring you and your opponent can see; selling it gives the Blessing up, and the Sell button says so first. The Crown's offer is now three of sixteen.

Beta v4.0m — Essence by the second

23 September 2026

• Miners pay as they dig. Essence arrives by the second through every build phase and every wave instead of landing in a lump when a wave ends, and a duel pauses it. A Miner's rate is now quoted a minute: a level-one Miner digs 1.5 a minute, and each upgrade adds 1.25. The chime and the tally at a wave's end say what the round paid.
• Twenty Miners and ten upgrade levels, down from fifty and twenty-four. The top of the economy is 255 Essence a minute, and it is a top a match can reach.

Beta v4.0l — Sends are for the next wave

23 September 2026

• You can still send mercenaries during a wave, but they join your opponent's next wave rather than the one being fought. That means nothing you send can be lost to a wave ending, the last second is no longer refused, and a send during the victory lap no longer drags the army back.

Beta v4.0k — A shorter bow

23 September 2026

• When you win a duel, each of your fighters vanishes as its blow lands on the enemy King, and the arena holds for two seconds after the last one instead of five.

Beta v4.0j — Bodies that stop, not bodies that shove

22 September 2026

• Nothing pushes a unit any more — not the enemy, not its own side. A body in the way stops a step where the two meet; it never corrects one afterwards. Most of the shoving you saw came from your own fighters walking through each other and being pushed apart again every tick, and that cannot happen now.
• A fighter locks on to whoever it meets first and keeps that fight until one of them dies; a body that arrives between two units already at arm's length does not steal it. A unit that cannot reach its target walks round whatever is in the way, and a creature that is outnumbered is surrounded by as many as physically fit and hit by all of them.
• Monsters no longer spawn inside each other: a new arrival takes the nearest clear spot at the gate, or waits a moment for one. Walls that hold are stronger than walls that leak, so the waves will be retuned against them next.

Beta v4.0i — The blow lands where you can see it

21 September 2026

• Winning a duel is something you watch now. Your fighters walk at the losing King and each one takes a point of his health as it arrives, so the number comes down while the army comes in — and the arena stays up for five seconds afterwards instead of cutting away the moment the last blow lands. The cost of losing one is unchanged: one health per fighter left standing.
• A fighter's name no longer loses its last letters in the hand. The card measured the name before the game's typeface had loaded, in a font 19% narrower, and decided it fitted.

Beta v4.0h — Honest tooltips

20 September 2026

• Every tooltip says what the game does. A skill is described from its own numbers, so a Ghoul says 6% and a Hound 1%; a send is quoted at the health and damage it will land with this wave and the income it really adds; the wave card's lead creature has a full sheet; the inspector quotes the refund a Blessing pays, lists every matchup, and shows what a buffed fighter hits for now; promotions you cannot afford can still be read; the reroll tooltip says its price.
• Resigning a PvP match pays no Silver to anybody, and a forfeit pays the winner only once the match had got past wave 1. A skin purchase and its delivery are one transaction. Switching accounts in the same browser can no longer show the previous account's profile or statement.
• Six new songs — Sunforge Skirmish, The Shattered Sigil, Checkmate at Dawn, Banners Unbroken, Hold the Last Gate and Clockwork Ambush — and the collection is sorted into Menu Music and Battle Themes. Shuffle plays the theme that fits where you are; any track can still be chosen for either.
• A crowd surrounds one creature instead of shoving it. As many attackers as fit stand around it; the rest wait a row back and step in when one falls. The duel arena has no build grid, and the strike on the losing King is shown as it lands.
• Mercenaries can be sent during a wave and land a second later. And a mercenary is the same creature on wave 1 and wave 30: it no longer scales with the wave, so what you pay in Essence is what arrives.
• The front page says what the game is and links How to Play, World Info, Patch Notes and Support the Game — on the title screen, and on the turn-your-phone card too, so a phone held upright can still read about the game. The guide says what a wave really locks (placement and promotions; Miners, King levels and sends stay open), the World Info tables scroll on a phone, and the sitemap dates a page by when its words last changed. On the title screen, only Enter or Space enters now, so Tab reaches the links.
• A mercenary sent in the last second of a wave is refused instead of charged and lost, and a send during the victory lap brings the army back to meet it. Submitting a bot match no longer stalls the server for everyone else. A monthly supporter's renewal is credited once and refunded exactly. Signing out closes your live connections, and a Discord sign-in can only be finished by the browser that started it. The tutorial names the real keys, and the Blessing plate is explained last.
• Signing in with Discord works again; the previous build refused every sign-in it had started itself. A live match also notices when a player's sign-in has expired, and a supporter's refund is reconciled against the right month even when Stripe's notice arrives without the payment on it, or before the payment itself was recorded.
• Right-clicking a fighter no longer sells it. Selling is the Sell button on a selected fighter, or its key, where the refund is shown first.
• World Info has a section on the duels, says what a wave locks and how long its clock runs, explains the ring a crowd makes around one enemy, sends during a wave, and which mercenaries wait behind the Advanced Barracks. The tutorial says the same: two new stops, for the Advanced Barracks and the duels, and the lane, clock, Send and Ready stops now tell the ring, the wave clock, sends during a wave and what a wave locks.
• The interface is one design, shown at the size your screen fits: the bar, the side panel and the bottom panels scale together, so a name that fits on one screen fits on every screen, and nothing is cut mid-word. Interface Size in Options still scales it further.
• Bodies take space, they do not shove. A unit that is surrounded holds its ground instead of being squeezed out of the crowd: every unit pushes with the same strength, and a body only ever steps aside for the room it needs. Nothing can be moved further in a moment than any other body, and a heap of units still sorts itself out rather than standing on one cell.
• Options now names the keys that actually mute the game — comma and period — instead of two that did nothing. And your match history counts only what the game accepted: a send it refused is no longer listed among the ones that went.

Beta v4.0g — Silver, and the store

20 September 2026

• Buying a Crown pack works. It had not since the store opened: the game and the server disagreed on the name of one field, and every pack purchase was refused as if the server were offline. Partial refunds take back the right share, a top-up lands even on a balance still in the red from a refund, opening two subscription links at once no longer makes two subscriptions, an invite code cannot put you in two matches, and a match where both players dropped and one came back now ends properly if the other never does.
• Silver, a currency you earn by playing. Every finished match pays some: a little against a bot, more against a player, more for a win than a loss, and more the further the match went. Up to 150 a day. Skins cost three times in Silver what they cost in Crowns, and the shop takes either.
• Crowns and Silver have their marks: a gold crown and a silver coin beside every price and balance, in place of the diamond that only said "a price".
• A Statement on your profile: every Crown and Silver in and out, newest first.

Beta v4.0f — Duels decide

19 September 2026

• A lost duel costs the King. Every winning fighter left standing marches on the losing King and takes one health when it arrives — the walk to him is the old victory lap, with a point. The board still comes back. In a duel the enemy's health bars are red, yours blue.
• Physical bodies now work in duels: the two armies collide, and a tank in the way is a tank you fight. Two enemies pressed into one spot come apart instead of sliding to the King together. Every unit turns to face what it is attacking.
• Crowded bodies come apart a step at a time instead of leaping.

Beta v4.0e — Pictures, not words

19 September 2026

• The interface says it with pictures. Gold is a bag, Essence a purple crystal, Miners a pickaxe; every number in the top bar, on the economy cards, on the sends and on your cards carries its mark and a short label instead of a word. Hover anything — or tab to it — and it explains itself: what the number is, what the button does, and the live figure behind it. The Barracks and Hand headings gained a ? for the sentences that used to be printed there. Options wears a gear. The status line under Ready is gone.
• On a phone, tap anything once to read what it is and again to use it. A tap anywhere else puts the words away.
• Every attack and armor type has its mark now — Occult, Holy, Normal and Astral attacks; Divine, Astral, Rune and Unarmored armor — and the eight that existed were redrawn to match. The role badge and the sword-or-bow on every card are drawn by the artist too. A Warlord wave carries a skull beside its number, the duel has its own mark, and supporters wear a proper crown.
• Everything you might buy can be read even when you cannot afford it: the Hero, Miners, King levels, every send and the reroll all show their tooltip whatever your purse says.
• Occult shots are a sickly green, so they no longer pass for arcane.

Beta v4.0d — The whole tutorial

19 September 2026

• The tutorial's spotlight lands on your King. On most desktop windows the board sits centered in the stage with backdrop either side, and the "Your King" step was lighting the backdrop. It asks the board where the King is now.
• First-time players are offered the whole tutorial — all twenty-one steps, the same one How to Play runs — rather than a five-step cut that stopped before Miners, sends and King levels. You can still leave it at any step.
• A brand-new account is offered the tutorial like any newcomer.

Beta v4.0c — Harder bots

19 September 2026

• The Normal and Hard opponents are considerably harder. Giving units physical bodies changed what a board is for — a fighter is a wall now, whatever its stats — and the opponent was still building the thin front line the old game wanted. It holds the line properly now: Normal went from losing to Beginner to beating it two times in three, and Hard beats Beginner four times in five.
• Insane is paid better. The hardest opponent is handed 30 gold at the end of every wave instead of 14 — it spends most of it on mercenaries, so expect to be sent at far more often. Hard and the rungs below are unchanged.
• Warlord waves 20 and 30 hit harder. They were measured to be the easiest waves near them — a few big monsters get surrounded — so each carries its own spike on damage as well as health. Wave 10 is unchanged.

Beta v4.0b — The arena

18 September 2026

• Each court in a duel now reads outward as King, throne, gate, arena — the throne stands beyond the gate instead of on top of it, so the portal your fighters walk through is visible at last, and both portals open onto the field.
• The duel arena is drawn as one picture again. It used to be stretched sideways to cover a board built for two lanes, which flattened the stonework and left the thrones stranded at the edges; it is now fitted on its own terms, undistorted, and about a quarter larger.
• The board has its border back. The platform frame grew in the last update and nothing told the layout, so on many screens the outer rails were drawn off the edge and the two lanes' frames ran into each other. The board is measured with its frame on it now.
• On a smaller window the board no longer sits marooned in a sea of backdrop while the side panel crushes its own labels. The width the board cannot use now goes to the Barracks, which shows its sends four columns wide instead of two.

Beta v4.0a — Read the fight

18 September 2026

• Your hand can be read while a wave is being fought. Hovering a card shows what it is, so the quiet minute during a fight is one you can spend planning the next build phase. Buying still waits for the build phase.
• A unit's tooltip shows the melee or ranged mark beside its name, the same one the cards carry.
• The incoming-wave card drops the g from its two figures — they are a yardstick for the wave, not money you hold — and says how your army compares in color instead of in words: white for about right, gold for over, red for under. Hovering the figure explains it.
• A Warlord is announced a build phase ahead. The end of waves 9, 19 and 29 now says what is coming and what it takes to stop it, instead of leaving a tag on the wave card to be found.
• The duel call says the build phase before a duel is half the usual length. It was the one thing it did not tell you.
• The Blessing panel now stays out of the way until the Crown has something to offer, and comes back for good once you hold one. The rest of the interface trial, and the trial switch itself, have gone.
• The interface trial is gone from the options, along with the three changes that were not kept and the flag it left in your browser.

Beta v4.0 — Bodies

18 September 2026

• Units have physical bodies. Nothing walks through anything any more: a wall of tanks is a wall, ten fighters attacking one monster have to surround it, and a monster with your front line in its face has to deal with your front line. Matches run a little shorter as a result.
• The Advanced Barracks costs 400 gold and 200 Essence, down from 500 and 300. At the old price it cost most of a match's sending to unlock the sends; at 250 and 100 it paid for itself too easily.
• Rerolls cost 25 more each time, all the way up: free, 25, 50, 75, 100, 125, and on. They also lean away from what you already have — a fighter on your board or in the hand you are replacing is a third as likely to come back, and the Hero works the same way.
• Health bars are coloured by side: your fighters, the wave, and whatever your opponent sent at you. The bar's length is the only thing that says how hurt it is.
• A hurt unit's health bar no longer changes its background color near death — it looked like the unit had been healed. The bar's length is the health; its color is the side.
• M belongs to Move alone. Mute is on comma and full stop now, shown beside the buttons.
• A fighter wearing a skin arrives already wearing it, instead of changing a second after it appears.
• The interface is built for a 1280 × 720 screen first and grows from there, rather than being squeezed down from a wide one. The top bar can no longer run underneath its own buttons, and a hand of six fighters keeps their names instead of trimming them to two letters.
• You can see what your opponent is wearing again. A skin equipped after signing in never reached the other player's screen, which is every skin anybody equips, so both sides of a match were being shown each other's default King and fighters.

Beta v3.9 — Rerolls never run out

18 September 2026

• Rerolls no longer stop at five. Every one after the fifth costs 10 Essence more than the one before it, so the sixth is 110 and it keeps climbing for the rest of the match. A hand you cannot build with is now a price rather than a dead end.
• Fighters and monsters no longer stand outside the arena. The rim was being drawn over the last stretch of ground at each end, so units walked onto floor with a stone rail painted across it. The frame now sits around the battlefield instead of on it.
• The incoming-wave card said “economy?” when your army was ahead of the wave. It now says what it meant, and hovering your army value explains why.

Beta v3.8 — Leaks bite

18 September 2026

• A monster that reaches your King costs twice what it used to. Matches now run about eleven minutes rather than fifteen, and they end because somebody's King fell rather than because the waves ran out.
• Letting one through is the most expensive thing you can do in a round. Holding clean has never been worth more.
• Matches are now recorded — the starting number and the moves, nothing else — so the balance can be studied from games people actually played instead of games the AI played against itself. Deleting your account deletes them.

Beta v3.7c — Only asks strangers

18 September 2026

• The first-time prompt no longer appears to anyone signed in, or to anyone who has played before in this browser. It was checking whether it had asked you, which is not the same question.

Beta v3.7b — Sideways first

18 September 2026

• On a phone in portrait, the menu can no longer be used past the turn-your-phone screen. It was drawn underneath it, so you could start a match sideways-on and never see the prompt telling you not to.

Beta v3.7a — Asked, not assumed

18 September 2026

• The tutorial no longer starts on its own. The first time you press Play, the game asks whether you would like to be shown how — and takes either answer as final.

Beta v3.7 — Taught, not tested

18 September 2026

• A first visit starts in the tutorial instead of at the menu, and the tutorial is five steps long rather than twenty-one: your lane, your King, your hand, what is coming, and how to start it. Skip is on every step.
• The rest of the tour is still there, whole, under How to Play — and the last step of the short one says so.

Beta v3.6a — Saying what things do

18 September 2026

• The first time a wave speeds up to catch the other lane, the game explains why instead of leaving a ×2 on the clock for you to work out.
• The last five seconds of a build phase count down over the board, where you are looking, instead of only in the corner where you are not.
• Ready, Reroll, Sell, Move, Forfeit and the lane switch all say what they do now. Every button that spends gold already explained itself; the ones that end a match did not.
• Move tells you it is waiting for a destination: pick it, and the hint under your hand says to click an empty cell.

Beta v3.6 — Catch-up speed

18 September 2026

• When one lane finishes its wave and the other is still fighting, the rest of that wave runs at double speed until it finishes too. A ×2 appears next to the phase so you know why.
• It does not matter whether the finished lane cleared the wave or leaked it — from the other side those are the same thing, which is that there is nobody left to watch.
• Nothing about the fight changes, only how long you spend waiting for it: the same armies kill the same monsters in the same order. Matches come out about two minutes shorter.

Beta v3.5c — Something on screen while it loads

18 September 2026

• The game says what it is while it loads, instead of showing a black rectangle until 1.5MB has arrived — so a slow connection looks like a slow connection rather than a broken game.

Beta v3.5b — The size setting works

18 September 2026

• Choosing an interface size now shows on the button you pressed, and on a sample card beside it, instead of waiting until you left Options to reveal what it had done.

Beta v3.5a — Findable

18 September 2026

• The game has its own pages now: How to Play, World Info, Patch Notes and Support the Game, each at its own address, readable without loading the game and linked from the front.
• A search for the game used to turn up the crown-less globe icon and a snippet quoting mercenary prices, because the page never said what it was. It does now.

Beta v3.5 — Room to read

18 September 2026

• Interface size, in Options: 100, 110, 125 or 150 per cent. The panels grow along with the text rather than the words getting bigger inside boxes that stayed the same, and above 100% a long fighter name wraps instead of being cut off.
• Upgrade, Sell and Move can be moved to whatever keys you like, in Options. They are still U, S and M to begin with — which are the initials of the English words, and the reason the setting exists.
• Starred units are gone. Your profile already worked out your favorite unit from the matches you actually played, which is the same answer without a button to press.
• There is an interface trial in Options you can switch on: the Blessing panel stays out of the way until the Crown offers one, the Barracks says what a send costs and what it does, the start screen gets a Begin button, and the pause menu explains where each way out leads.

Beta v3.4a — Arrows

18 September 2026

• Ranged attacks fire drawn projectiles. An arrow is an arrow, arcane is a mote of violet force, a siege shot is a hurled weight — one for each of the eight damage types, where all of them were the same two-pixel line before.
• Each shot turns onto its own line of flight and is drawn above the crowd it is crossing, which is the whole point: a shot behind the bodies is a shot nobody sees.
• The line is still there underneath. The first shot of a match is drawn as one while the art loads, and anything without art of its own falls back to it rather than firing nothing.

Beta v3.4 — A duel pays

18 September 2026

• Winning a duel pays gold: 50 for the first, 150 for the second, 300 for the third. The amount climbs because what a wave pays climbs — a flat prize would have been most of a fighter after wave 5 and a rounding error after wave 25.
• The call names the stake. You are told what the duel is worth while you still have half a build phase to do something about it, rather than after you have won it.
• The loser is paid nothing and loses nothing. A rite costs you the result and the result only.

Beta v3.3a — The lap, and the shots

18 September 2026

• The winning army walks off the field. It used to run to the far end and come back, which read as a victory lap the way a dog fetching a stick reads as one. Now they march out past the edge of the arena and the stone is left empty.
• Arrows, bolts and spells land where they were aimed during a duel. Every other thing on the stone had been moved onto the arena's own map and shots had not, so they were still being drawn as though the fight were happening in a lane — which meant they flew off to one side of the units they were supposed to hit.

Beta v3.3 — The call, and the lap

18 September 2026

• A duel is announced when the wave ends, and you get half a build phase to answer it. Buy a body for the fight, promote the one you have, or bank it and take the duel as it stands — what is on your board when the arena loads is what walks onto the stone.
• After the rite you get a normal build phase before the next wave. A duel is the only moment your board and theirs are measured against each other, and being shown that without being able to act on it would make it a cutscene with a scoreboard.
• The winning army takes a lap. Five seconds up the arena and back, and then everyone goes home exactly as they were.
• Mercenaries you send while preparing arrive with the next wave, as sends always do. It is the fighters you buy that stand in the duel.
• What you are sending is written above your opponent's board, where it is going, instead of squeezed under the Barracks heading. It says nothing when there is nothing to say.
• The duel arena is the size of the whole board rather than one lane, your own King is always on the left, and fighters face what they are fighting.

Beta v3.2a — The duel, looked at

18 September 2026

• Both Kings are on the field, each on his own throne at his own end. A rite is watched, and without them the arena was a slab of stone with an army at each end and nothing to say whose they were.
• The arena runs throne to throne, and the two armies line up either side of the middle with a gap between them — the same gap whatever the boards are worth, so every duel opens with a charge.
• Your front line leads it. It was leading with the back rank before, which is exactly as good an idea as it sounds.
• A portal at both ends. Both courts march out through their own gate.
• Fighters face what they are fighting. They used to face the way they started, so anything that got behind them was hit over the shoulder.
• DOMINATION sounds when a duel is won, for both players. A draw still says nothing, which is the honest version of not having a result.

Beta v3.2 — The Duel

17 September 2026

• After waves 5, 15 and 25 both Kings are pulled onto neutral ground and the armies you have built fight each other. It is the first time their board and yours share a screen. Nothing can be ordered once the arena loads — you read the two boards for five seconds, and then you watch.
• Nobody dies at a rite. Whatever happens, both boards come back exactly as they were: same fighters, same cells, full health. A duel costs you nothing but the result.
• Everything runs and swings at double speed in a duel, so it is about fifteen seconds rather than thirty. There is no reward yet — the fifty gold comes once the fight reads right.
• The Store has moved into Support the Game. Crowns buy cosmetics and nothing else, and a shop with its own door in the main menu said otherwise.
• Iron Crown gives the King 100 health instead of 250. At 250 it was the answer rather than a choice.
• A new Blessing: the Coronation gives your King one level of every upgrade, free, with none of the income a bought level carries.

Beta v3.1 — Units make room for each other

17 September 2026

• Units of the same side no longer stand inside each other. They spread across the lane instead of piling onto one point, so you can see what is in a fight. Four percent of same-side pairs used to sit on the exact same pixel — two units drawn as one — and that is now none of them.
• A wave that arrives spread out is a harder wave, and the early ones are harder than they were yesterday. The recommended army has been re-measured for the new geometry: waves 1 to 10 ask for more, and waves 11 to 30 ask for less, because a spread wave can be reached by your whole board instead of the corner of it.
• A new Blessing of the Crown: the Coronation gives your King one level of every upgrade, free, with none of the income a bought level carries. Twelve to be dealt from now.

Beta v3.0c — Six more songs

17 September 2026

• Six new tracks: Adventures in 8-Bit, The Pixel King, Gime That Pixel, The Trigger to My Chrono, Cobblestone Kings Part II, and Pixel Me That. Seventeen in the soundtrack now, all of them in the shuffle and all of them pickable in Options.
• They are level-matched to the rest of the collection, so shuffle does not jump in volume when a new one comes round.

Beta v3.0b — Wave one, and eight fixes

17 September 2026

• Wave one is holdable, and the opponent now holds it too. Bots were leaking 40% of their opening waves with money still in their pocket — buying two cheap fighters where wave one needs three, and putting an archer behind them. It is 4% now.
• You can see how much your opponent has sent at you before the wave starts — the total only, never what it is. It used to be hidden until it landed, which meant the wave arrived bigger than the recommendation you had just built to, with nothing on screen having mentioned it.
• The Barracks tells you what your sending is doing: what you have queued while you build, and how many of your mercenaries are still standing once the wave runs.
• You can click your own fighters during a fight. You never could, which meant you could inspect a monster mid-battle but not the unit you were worried about.
• The enemy lane is audible on a desktop, quietly. It has been silent since the audio landed — not muted on purpose, just never reachable from a desktop camera.
• Select a fighter and the upgrade, move and sell buttons are right there under its name instead of below the stats. U, M and S do the same three things from the keyboard.
• A fight reads properly. Units in front are drawn in front — monsters used to paint over your fighters whatever the position — and health bars and the selection ring now draw above the artwork instead of behind it.
• The main menu fits the window without scrolling.
• A tooltip no longer strands itself over the board when the build phase ends under your cursor.

Beta v3.0a — Blessings, and eight more damage types

17 September 2026

• Four Blessings of the Crown are now bursts instead of permanents. Bounty Hunter triples kill gold for wave 11; Deep Veins gives every Miner 6 more Essence for waves 11 and 12; Second Wind doubles the clean-wave bonus for the same two waves; Warlord's Call is 20% and applies to your next send, so it keeps until you actually send something.
• Second Wind was the reason to look. Doubling the clean-wave bonus for a whole match was paying over 4,000 gold — more than twice the next most expensive Blessing, and nobody had noticed, because the bonus it doubles is small at wave 11 and enormous at wave 25.
• Two new Blessings that pay at once: Greed Is Good gives 100 gold, Sunstrider's Wish gives 80 Essence. Eleven to be dealt from instead of nine.
• A Blessing now tells you how long it has left, and the Crown no longer waits: if you have not chosen by the end of the build phase, it picks the first of your three for you.
• Four new attack types and four new armors — Occult, Holy, Normal and Astral; Divine, Astral, Rune and Unarmored. No unit carries one yet and nothing in combat has moved; they are assigned a race at a time, measured, starting next patch.
• Every armor now has two counters instead of one, and the wave card names both. Being dealt eight random fighters and no answer to the wave in front of you is half as likely as it was.
• Iron Crown gives the King 250 health instead of 60. It had quietly become the weakest Blessing in the set — 60 health is worth about 35 gold at the upgrade counter, where the others pay 100 to 167.

Beta v3.0 — Open to everyone

16 September 2026

• War of Fantasia is in beta and open to the public. The game has been playable and live for months; what changes today is that it is finished enough to hand to strangers rather than to friends.
• Supporting the game now gives you Crowns to spend in the store — 100 for every dollar, the same rate as the smallest Crown pack, so supporting is never a cheaper way to buy them than buying them.
• You can buy Crowns. The store has had prices and a balance since the cosmetics landed and no way to add to it; there are three packs now, and the bigger ones cost less per Crown.
• The menu tells you how many other players are online, and an empty match queue now offers you the bot and a match code instead of leaving you watching a spinner.
• Every King skin breathes. The figure itself is drawn frame by frame rather than an effect laid over him — 114 animations, one for every skin in every damage state and both lane colors. The free King stands perfectly still, as he always has.
• 4 v 4 is canceled. It had sat in the menu as “Coming soon” for months without being built, and a promise in the one place everybody reads the roadmap should be a real one. The second mode will be Essence Wars.
• The Support page is a letter from Erik now, with where the world came from, what the money pays for, and what it does not buy. It does not buy power, and it never will.

Alpha v2.3 — The upgrade tree, finished

12 September 2026

• Every fighter from tier 1 to tier 4 can now be promoted. Twenty new units: a tier 2 for each race, a tier 3, and two tier 5s — the top of the tree, and the strongest thing on the board short of a Hero.
• A promotion never moves a fighter off its square, and never changes which line it fights on. What stands at the front stays at the front.
• All twenty are drawn and in the game; their animations follow.
• Four difficulties instead of five. Easy is gone: measured over a thousand matches it was the same opponent as Beginner, and a menu entry that promises a step the game cannot deliver is worse than no entry. Beginner, Normal, Hard and Insane are unchanged — whatever you picked before, you face the same bot now.
• Insane is harder than Hard for the first time. The two used to have identical play; Insane now sells and replaces fighters that have stopped earning their square.
• Hard and Insane are properly harder. Both now get a small gold allowance each wave on top of what they earn — Beginner and Normal are unchanged, so the default opponent is the one you already know.
• Your portrait, name and Crowns sit at the top of every menu screen. Click them for your profile, or the Crown count for the Store.
• Profile is no longer one of the menu buttons — it is that strip. Six buttons instead of seven, and if you are not signed in the strip is where you do it.
• The Store opens with what you already own, so your skins are not something to hunt for in a list of thirty-seven.
• Three wave monsters have real abilities instead of quiet auras. Bulwarks bellow and pull your fighters onto themselves; Hexlings mark your sturdiest unit so it takes more damage; Overseers lash the horde forward so the wave arrives sooner. Every tier of those families has them now — what you learn on wave 6 is still true on wave 26.

Alpha v2.2 — Income is something you build

11 September 2026

• Wave income no longer climbs on its own. It used to start at +25 and rise by 18 every wave whether you did anything or not; now it starts at zero and every gold of it comes from Miners and the mercenaries you send. Play the economy or run out.
• Sends pay three times what they used to, because they are the economy now rather than a supplement. Over a full match players build to around 670 gold a wave — more than the old curve ever handed out, and all of it earned.
• Monsters hit less hard as the waves climb. The old damage curve was matched to the income that no longer exists, and left unchanged it ended every match around wave sixteen.
• The result, measured over 120 matches: the average match now reaches wave 21 instead of 25, one in ten reaches wave 30 instead of one in five, and a typical match runs 21 minutes instead of 25. Harder, and shorter.
• Fixed: Battlefields showed as a checkerboard instead of the board you equipped. The art was on disk the whole time and the game never asked for it.
• Fixed: when two Kings somehow ended a match exactly level on health and leaks, the winner was decided by a coin flip instead of by who built the better economy. That tiebreak had never once been able to fire.
• The patch notes are split into shorter blocks. Three versions had grown past twenty entries each, which is too long to read; v1.9, v2.0 and v2.1 are now lettered sub-patches. Nothing was reworded or removed — the same notes, in blocks you can finish.
• Fixed: the visitor counting added last release never worked at all — every measurement was refused by the browser for a week, and nothing said so. It counted zero of everything.
• Ranked is for people. Beating the Insane bot used to file a result on the Ranked board; it no longer does, and no difficulty of AI ever will. Ranked stays empty until ranked matches between players open, and it will work on placement matches and a climb against opponents near your level.
• Fixed: a refused action during a live match printed a raw error code, and printed it on the lobby screen instead of the match — wiping your invite code if you were hosting. Nine of the server's eighteen answers had no wording at all, including the one for a buy or send that did not go through.
• Fixed: the army readout at the top and the wave card disagreed about whether you were underbuilt whenever a mercenary was on the field. The card counted the send; the readout did not.
• Fixed: equipping a skin said nothing when it failed. It now tells you why.
• “Favorite units” is now “Starred units”, so it stops being confused with the favorite unit worked out from your match history.
• On a phone, the King's name and health no longer draw at three times their size. Text is now held at a readable size whatever the camera is doing, and set in the game's own typeface rather than the phone's; the floating damage numbers had the same fault and got the same fix.
• On a phone, sound follows the lane you are looking at. Turn to watch your opponent and you hear their battle rather than both at once. Your own leaks, your King in trouble and the click of your own buttons still sound wherever the camera is pointed.
• Fixed on every device: hits and hurts had been playing for both lanes at once since the game shipped — about half the noise of a match coming from a fight you are not in.
• Fixed, and it had been wrong since phones were supported: on a phone, switching to your opponent's lane and back left your own King with no name and no health number for the rest of the match. The bar was still there, which is why nobody could put their finger on what looked wrong.
• Leaving a match now takes you to the menu instead of to the title screen, so you no longer press Enter twice to get back to where you were.
• Leaving a match, finishing one, or stepping out of the tutorial now takes you to the menu. All three used to drop you on the title screen, where you pressed Enter again to get back to where you already were.
• Nine new tracks, and a soundtrack picker in Options. Choose what plays in the menu and what plays in a match, or set either to shuffle and hear the whole collection one track after another. Leave it alone and nothing changes — the original two keep playing where they always did.
• Leaving a match before the first wave has resolved no longer counts as a loss. Walking out of a game you are losing still does — that has not changed — but closing something you only just opened is not the same thing. Giving up a live match against a person still counts, immediately, because somebody else is waiting on it.

Alpha v2.1d — Skins

10 September 2026

• Four new King skins in the Store: the Samurai King, the Demonic King, the Dragon Armor King and the Iron King. 800 Crowns each, and as always only you see the one you are wearing.
• Battlefields: you can now repaint your own side of the board. Four to choose from — Wintertide, Emberwake, Nightglass and Overgrowth — at 400 Crowns each or 1200 for all four. Your opponent always sees the default board, so a battlefield can never make their lane harder to read.
• Six more King skins: the Lion, Tiger, Puppy, Panda, Cute Pink and Old One Kings. That completes the line at ten, each with its own armor rather than its own cloak.
• Brightwire: all five Heroes in matte black composite laced with light, one color per race — gold-white, pale green, violet, amber, ice-blue. The light brightens when they attack, pulses when they wait, and goes out when they fall. 500 Crowns each or 2000 for all five.

Alpha v2.1c — Counting, and what broke

10 September 2026

• Fixed: the AI never subtracted the Advanced Barracks from its shopping money, so on the wave it unlocked, the last fighters it tried to place were refused and never appeared.
• Fixed: matches longer than about 33 minutes were thrown away instead of recorded. The server's limit had been measured against bot-versus-bot matches, which skip the build phases that are half of a real one.
• Fixed: a match the server refused for a reason nobody had written words for showed you the raw error code. The build now refuses to ship a refusal that cannot explain itself.
• The site now counts visitors, using Cloudflare Web Analytics — no cookies, no advertising trackers, nothing stored on your device and nothing that follows you anywhere else. That is also why you are not being asked to accept anything: there is nothing to accept.
• The game also adds up what happens in it — matches started, waves reached — and sends those totals to our own server and nowhere else. It is counts only: no account, no session, no identifier of any kind, and three columns in the table. The privacy policy spells out exactly what is and is not in it.

Alpha v2.1b — The phone, and your profile

10 September 2026

• On a phone the hand is always on screen now, in a rail down the side of the board, instead of a panel you opened and that closed itself after every card. Placing three fighters used to be three round-trips inside a thirty-second phase.
• The bottom bar is down to four tabs, because the hand no longer needs one.
• Your opponent's King health and army value sit above your hand on a phone. You only see one lane there, so the two numbers that say whether you are winning were invisible unless you went and looked.
• Leaving a match now counts as a loss and appears in your history, flagged as abandoned. It used to record nothing at all — which made walking out of a match you were losing free, and left an honest evening of play showing as one match on your profile.
• Your profile leads with wins, losses and win rate, and each ladder's record is a column per number instead of one long sentence in a table cell.
• Match history says how long ago each match was, and tells a win, a loss and an abandoned match apart at a glance.

Alpha v2.1 — Shorter matches, not a shorter build phase

10 September 2026

• Everything on the board moves 25% faster. Fights resolve quicker; the roster keeps the speeds it was balanced with relative to each other.
• Waves hit 10% harder, with nothing given back in gold. Measured over 120 matches, the share reaching wave 30 falls from 34% to 27%.
• The AI is greedier and spends more of its purse. It was holding back a seventh of its gold every wave and playing a line its own greedy setting beat.
• A monster that reaches your King now costs 25% more health, and each King Regen level heals a fifth less. Matches were being decided by how long they ran rather than by anybody's King: over 120 matches the median falls from 29 minutes to 27, and the share dragging past wave 30 from 27% to 20%.
• Monsters that get through run for your King at three times their speed. Once nothing of yours is left in front of one, the wave is already decided — this only stops you watching it walk. It cannot apply while a fighter of yours still stands between the monster and the King, so nothing you can still do about a wave plays any differently.

Alpha v2.0d — Fixes

10 September 2026

• The game goes quiet when you switch to another app or another tab, and picks up where it left off when you come back.
• Fixed: this screen was only showing the first six notes of each version, so most of the changes above have been invisible until now.
• Fixed: if both players disconnected from a live match, both were charged a loss for a match neither finished.
• The menu no longer says PvP is coming soon. It is here: a friend by invite code, or anyone in the queue.
• Fixed: a match in which you bought the Advanced Barracks was thrown away instead of recorded, so it never reached the leaderboard. The server checks every command in a match before it will count it, and the unlock was the one command it had never been taught.
• Fixed: for the same reason, the Advanced Barracks could not be unlocked at all in a PvP match. The button did nothing.

Alpha v2.0c — No last wave, and the phone

10 September 2026

• The waves do not stop at thirty. Once the schedule runs out the gates simply begin again at its worst tier, harder every time round, with more Warlords every tenth wave — until one of the two Kings falls. About a third of matches already ran past wave 30; the game had never said so, and in one place claimed otherwise.
• There is no such thing as a drawn match. Two Kings that fall together, or that stand level, are separated by health, then by who leaked less, then by who built the better economy. Somebody always loses.
• On a phone, looking at one lane now shows only that lane. The camera zoomed in but the other lane stayed on screen above or below it, too small to read and drawn for nothing.
• Fixed: while looking at your opponent's lane, tapping their board placed a fighter in the matching cell of your own. Placement now follows the lane you are looking at.
• Placing a fighter on a phone shows you where it will go before it goes there. Press and the ghost appears under your finger; slide to move it; lift to place. Lifting straight away works exactly as it always did.
• A press just outside the grid now counts as the cell you were aiming at, the way a press just outside a fighter already counted as that fighter.
• Every button and card now visibly reacts to being pressed. Until now the only sign a press had registered was a click sound, which a muted phone never plays.
• The build timer warms and pulses for the last ten seconds, with a bar under it that empties across the phase. It was plain text whose only warning was a sound.
• The wave starting now closes an open panel and says so if it took a card out of your hand or a move you had started, instead of discarding them without a word.

Alpha v2.0b — A face for the game

10 September 2026

• The Warrior tier is now Corrupted: Corrupted Grunt, Corrupted Wraith, and so on through all ten families.
• The interface has a typeface at last. Titles and names are carved capitals; the stat bar and every number are condensed and properly aligned.
• The menu and the skin store have been redressed: carved plates with gold inlay instead of flat panels, and the store now lays out properly in shelves.
• The menu fits any window now — the whole list, including Quit, on short screens.
• The pause button is a labeled Options button, and the sound controls live inside that panel as well as in the bar.
• The Skins screen is now the Store, which is what it is: skins today, Crowns and sets alongside them.
• Fixed: the version in the corner drifted up the screen instead of staying in it. It had been pinned to the page rather than to the window ever since the menu learned to scroll.
• Fixed: the version in the corner and the sound buttons sat underneath the menu's scrollbar whenever the menu was tall enough to have one.

Alpha v2.0 — Two languages

10 September 2026

• The whole game speaks Spanish. Every line of text in the game — menus, tooltips, the encyclopedia, the lore, these notes — in neutral Spanish that reads the same in Santo Domingo and in Madrid. Switching is instant and does not interrupt a match; the two players in a live match can even be reading different languages.
• An Options screen, on the menu and inside the in-match Options panel: separate volume dials for music and effects, not just mute, and a language picker.
• Fixed: the Options screen was unreadable. It was drawn straight onto the splash art with nothing behind it; it now sits on the same painted panel as every other page.
• Fixed: the Play screen stayed in English however the language was set. Its five mode buttons were the one place in the game that read their words once at start-up instead of every time they are drawn.
• The interface is written in American English throughout — armor, color, gray — instead of British with one American word in it.
• Fixed: switching language mid-match left half the screen in the old one. The hand, the wave card and the selected-unit panel each redraw only when their contents change, and a language is not contents.

Alpha v1.9c — Fixes and tuning

10 September 2026

• Fixed: matches against the AI were never counting toward the Ranked board, because nothing could reach the difficulty it asked for. Insane is the ranked one, and the leaderboard now opens on the AI board.
• Fixed: Play Again started a match the server would not record. Every match against the AI counts now, and the end screen says so when one does not.
• Fixed: the Bloatling exploded on a loop from the moment it arrived. It waits until it dies, as intended.
• Fixed: the pause button was drawn on top of the sound controls, so one click did both.
• Music and sound now show whether they are on without being hovered — lit or recessed, and the word struck through when muted.
• Rally 1 moved from the Spawnling to the Deep Lurker, and Rally 2 to the Brood Horror. The cheapest send in the game is the swarm, not an aura carrier.
• Miners train in two seconds instead of two and a half.
• Send tooltips describe the creature instead of repeating the income printed on the card.

Alpha v1.9b — Pause, forfeit and reconnect

10 September 2026

• You can pause a live match. Three per player per match; your opponent can start it again five seconds after you stop it.
• Every match now has a pause button and a way out — forfeit, back to the menu, or quit the game.
• If your opponent disconnects, the match stops for a minute instead of handing their seat to a bot. After that you choose: take the win, or play on against the bot for no record.
• Reload or close the tab mid-match and you drop straight back into it when you come back.
• A match clock in the top bar, and the match length on the end screen. It counts game time, so it stops while the match is paused.

Alpha v1.9 — The mercenary rewrite

10 September 2026

• Thirty new mercenaries, replacing every send in the game. Nine families of three, plus three things that do not fit anywhere.
• The send list is a ladder now: no two sends cost the same, and each pays exactly one more income than the one below it.
• Advanced Barracks. 500 gold and 300 Essence, once, unlocks eleven more sends including the strongest of every aura.
• Frenzy, Rally and Ward each come at three strengths now, on nine different sends. They do NOT stack — you get the strongest one, so climbing beats collecting.
• The Bloatling is bought to die: it bursts where it falls. Put it somewhere expensive.
• Ranged units fire something you can see. Arrows, bolts and motes now travel from the shooter to whatever they are shooting.
• The mercenaries have their own voices. Every one of the thirty was borrowing a wave monster's death cry; twelve new creature performances replace them.
• Frenzy, Ward and the Bloatling's burst are visible at last. All three were firing with nothing on screen to show for it.

Alpha v1.8 — Skins

9 September 2026

• A skin store, under Skins on the menu. Eight King skins, a Hero skin for every one of the five races, and gilded Militia and Archer.
• Every skin is a repaint and nothing else. No skin changes health, damage, range, speed or cost — the simulation cannot even see them.
• Buying Crowns is not switched on yet. The store is open so you can see what is there and what it costs; the till follows.
• A pause button, and a way to leave a match or the game — including on a phone, which had neither.
• Hold the Miner or a mercenary button to buy several without clicking several times.
• The Music and Sound buttons now look muted when they are muted.

Alpha v1.7 — Your account is yours

9 September 2026

• You can delete your account from the Profile screen. It takes your name, sign-in, portrait, favorites and every match record with it, permanently — no copy is kept.
• Accounts from before v1.6 have been cleared out. Passwords stopped working when they were replaced by sign-in links and Discord, so those accounts could no longer be opened by anyone. Sign in again by email or Discord and the slate is clean.

Alpha v1.6 — The world, sign-ins and supporters

9 September 2026

• World Info has a world: who the five peoples are, why they are at each other's throats, and the question nobody can answer about the gates.
• Every page of World Info is illustrated with the game's own art.
• No more passwords. Sign in with a link emailed to you, or with Discord.
• Profiles: pick any unit as your portrait, see your last ten matches, your favorite unit, your favorite send, and the one that keeps letting you down.
• Support the game from the start menu, one-off or monthly. Supporters get a crown and a gold name — and no gameplay advantage of any kind, ever.

Alpha v1.5 — The economy ceiling and send auras

9 September 2026

• Up to 50 Miners and 24 Miner upgrade levels: the economy has a ceiling worth climbing again.
• King Regen heals 10% less per level.
• The ranged mark is a bow now, in blue, so melee and ranged tell apart at a glance.
• Three sends carry an aura at the same price and one less income: Hexling makes nearby monsters attack 15% faster, Corrupted Overseer shouts for 10% more damage, Bulwark wards nearby monsters for 2.5% less damage taken.

Alpha v1.4 — The art refresh

9 September 2026

• New art: the logo, the splash (the board itself, seen from above), every frame and button redrawn at twice the resolution, and the board's sea, rim, gate and dais repainted.
• The floor is flagstones on the build grid: one stone is one square.
• The game draws at your screen's real pixel density; interface chrome is sharp on phones and high-density displays.
• Sound is on or off: one button for music, one for effects.

Alpha v1.3 — Phones, chat, and a braver opening

9 September 2026

• Starting gold is 150; wave one is unchanged. Overbuild it, or build exactly enough and bank the rest.
• The game plays on phones and tablets: sideways, one lane on screen at a time with a button to look at the other, the controls in sheets along a bottom bar, tap to place, tap a fighter to read, sell or move it.
• In-match chat for live matches: Enter to talk, a window you can drag, half-faded until you type.
• Resign from a live match (two taps). If your connection drops, a Normal-strength bot plays your seat until you are back, and signing in again puts you straight back into the match.
• Fighters stand in the middle of their squares. Three separate offsets had them on the lines; all three are gone.
• Sound effects play everywhere, iPhone included, and cost almost nothing to play.
• The tutorial's Show me on the screen button works again.
• Music and sound are two icon buttons on phones, notes and a speaker, with sliders on the menu screens.
• Sent mercenaries arrive one second after the wave's first monster, whatever the wave's size.
• The board is drawn at the screen's real pixel density: sharp on phones and high-density displays.

Alpha v1.2 — 1 v 1 against people

8 September 2026

• Play a friend by invite code, or anyone waiting through Quick match.
• Both players run the same match; the server keeps the one true copy and both must press Ready to skip the clock.
• A latency readout in the HUD; a dropped connection is retried automatically.
• PvP results go on their own leaderboard.

Alpha v1.1 — Launch-day fixes

8 September 2026

• The leaderboard is its own screen, shown once you are signed in.
• The board's frame sits outside the grid instead of over it.
• Your hand is always one row of six.
• The wave starting clears your selection; click a monster during a wave to read it.

Alpha v1.0 — Launch

8 September 2026

• Original score and a full sound set.
• A guided tutorial over the real screen, twenty-one stops.
• Right-click sells a fighter; sword and bow marks for melee and ranged; role badges for Tank, DPS, Versatile, Splash, Support and Hero.
• Miners queue per click and build in 2.5 seconds; Miners and King levels can be bought during a wave.
• A 12 by 7 board, waves twice as thick at the same strength, and 10% harder overall; fighters and monsters walk 25% faster.
• Twice the Miners and Miner upgrades at half the value each; three King ladders: Health, Armor, Regen.
• Every fighter's durability re-measured against Legion TD 2; the back line got two to three times its health.
• Accounts, verified match records and per-ladder leaderboards; the game lives at warofantasia.com.