Cardaire: Eternal Aces

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• Announcements·1 Sept 2026Official

  Launch Date Announcement

  Clear those calendars, and cancel your dinner plans at that fancy restaurant, because Cardaire: Eternal Aces is officially launching November 9th! Take this snazzy new trailer to celebrate:
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• Announcements·19 Aug 2026Official

  Devlog 2: It's in the cards

  (Banner art: Twilight Knight by Vincent Graphic Art)Attention Cardaire players! I'm sorry to say there is going to be a re-pair for round 3. Please hold tight while we print out the new pairings.It's your humble Cardaire dev aeiou here! Today I wanted to talk about something fairly important to card games... Cards!What is it about these little paper rectangles that make them so addictive? I would argue that it starts with the game design behind them. Let's take a deep dive into some new features specific to Cardaire: Eternal Aces that go a long way toward making a more fun card game. I even have some exclusive new card reveals along the way to keep things interesting! Oooo shiny cards oooo read the long boring devlog article to see the cards ooo.ArchetypesDragons, warriors, fire souls, dark souls, and more! Fleshed out archetypes were left on the cutting room floor for the first game, and it's something that I really wanted to include. In a card game's early life there often is a primordial soup of "Best" cards, and these form a single dominant "Best" deck in the format. If nothing gates cards from being played together there isn't any reason to not just play the most efficient cards in one slop pile.This is where archetypes come in. Archetypes reward you for playing in theme with powerful cards. You get to play the cool Dark power card or Beast finisher only if you have enough cards to support them. This leads to fun deckbuilding questions. "Is my deck playing enough Earth cards to make this Earth specific card good?"On a simpler level they work as signposts for deck building. Cardaire: Eternal Aces is slated to have TWICE the amount of cards as the first game. It can be overwhelming starting from a blank slate. Building an archetype deck gives you a starting place of cards that fit a specific theme.Peanut Butter and ChocolateMore advanced deck builders even get to mix and match archetypes. This is one of my favorite parts of differentiating card types and attribut...
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• Announcements·2 Jun 2026Official

  Devlog: Making a Better Opponent

  (Banner art: Harmonious Stag by Zalogon) Attention Cardaire players! Your round 3 pairings are now up! Oh also, it's aeiou here, your humble Cardaire dev. If there's one thing I enjoy as much as making card games, it's TALKING ABOUT making card games.So I wanted to take a second to check in and talk about everyone's favorite topic. The enemy duel AI. If there was one piece of feedback I heard loud and clear from the original Cardaire, it was about the opponents. Enemy AI was the biggest complaint by a mile.So for this go around, tuning up the enemy brain mush was a top priority.The Random Number Generator EraLet me paint a picture of how the enemy AI decision process worked in the original Cardaire. It went a little something like this:If the enemy had more than one card in their hand they would pick one randomly and convert it to energy.Then they would choose a random card to play from their hand in a totally random slot.Finally, they would attack with all their souls at completely random targets.This lead to some comedy moments when the AI would damage themselves, or make terrible attacks. And while bullying a low powered opponent can be fun, it feels a bit empty after a while.Getting SmartFixing this was one of the more complicated projects I tackled. I started by taking that old system where the opponent made all their choices randomly, and slowly began replacing those random coin flips with actual logic.Whenever the AI made a play I would not have made myself, I would step into their logic and add code for them to make a better decision. So now they started checking the kinds of things a real player would. What makes sense to play in this situation based on the exact game state? What attacks are the most profitable right here? Does making this specific play leave me dead on board?How It Works Now (Step by Step)So after a fair bit of work, here is how the AI makes choices currently:Energy Conversion: If they have more than one card in hand and cannot afford to p...
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• Patch Notes·7 May 2026Official

  Demo Update v0.1.37

  Enjoying throwing some cards? Pull something sick from the Lucky Draw machine? Gwen punch your face in and make you rethink your deck building choices? However things are going for you, I hope you're enjoying this little early preview of the full game. I have a small list of updates I wanted to push live while the demo is still up, and an even larger list of mostly QOL updates that have been added to my backlog from suggestions that I am going to look into before launch. Remember kids, devs who don't post full patch notes are cowards! - aeiou Patch Notes: - Directional movements will no longer take priority over each other. You'll always just move in the last direction you pressed - Gamepad Mode: Hitting the cancel gamepad button will no longer pass turn if you have a soul selected, it will instead unselect that soul - Gamepad Mode: Added a line from the soul you are playing to the slot you are focusing to better indicate what you're currently playing - Added a Lifebond orb to souls on the field that currently have Lifebond - Touched up enemy attack logic to address a bug where they could attack a soul multiple times even when the first attack should have destroyed it - Deprioritized enemy AI playing card draw cards if they have a large hand already - Maybe most importantly, added a small celebration for the main menu logo hitting a corner
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• Announcements·22 Nov 2025Official

  Announcing Cardaire: Eternal Aces!

  Attention Cardaire Duelists!aeiou here, your humble Cardaire creator. I've been bursting at the seams with excitement to announce my next project for a few months now. But it’s finally time for me to loosen those seams and announce…Cardaire: Eternal Aces !!!!I hope you enjoy the little trailer I've put togther, throw your local game dev a wishlist if ya can. Dev work on the next game has been buzzing along at a great pace, enough so that I felt it was time to get a Steam page up to show off progress. Fast FactsHere are some fast facts about Cardaire: Eternal Aces:Made from scratch in a new engine (Godot).A new game in the Cardaire universe, not a remake of Cardaire.Core Collectible Card RPG gameplay remains the same: exploring, gathering resources, slowly powering SO MANY of the things that players left as feedback for the first game (ability to save multiple decks, improved deck editor and duel UI, and so so much more)Over TWO HUNDRED cards, DOUBLING the amount of cards in the first gameWhen can you play this thing?Well, as soon as I finish it is the short answer! As a solo dev, the timeline depends a lot on dev roadblocks and, honestly, like, my life events sometimes. With that said, my current goal is a launch sometime in very Late 2026 (November is a good month to launch Cardaire games, I hear)Now if you'll excuse me I have some dev work to get back to!
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