Areteion

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• Announcements·28 Aug 2026Official

  1.0.17: Persistent Power, a Bigger Board, and the Hero's Journey Rebuilt

  Areteion 1.0.17 Reasoning Areteion launched as a game of tight puzzles: every turn a tricky situation to survive, and the rules were constrained on purpose to keep that tension up. Your feedback since launch, in the reviews and on the forum, has been clear about the price of it: too much randomness, too much to keep in mind at once, and setbacks that hit far harder than the mistake deserved. The sharpest form of it is a good run ended by something nobody could have played around. Hero's Journey is where the game's long-term fun should live, and this patch rebuilds it around that. Every journey is now five challenges, so each one matters, and a run that dies takes five challenges with it, not eight. Argonautica is open from your first run instead of waiting behind a Labors win. Card rewards offer rarer cards far more often, with free rerolls for when an offer holds nothing your deck wants. And your runs now leave a mark: the Hall of Deeds fills a square for every Olympian you carry to victory in every mode, and its Chronicle remembers the runs themselves, won or lost. The rest of the patch takes the swings out from under it. Storms and snow no longer occur. Curses arrive at severity 0 when your favor is at or above the round number, so favor is a defence you can choose to pay for instead of a roll you sit through. The board is bigger and opens wider, with the tiles around your start explored and empty. Undo takes back a misclick, as long as nothing has been drawn, explored or rolled since. The AI plays a much stronger, steadier game, and what it was handed is now a single number on the challenge panel: the Arete it starts with. More freedom made everything cheap. When Power carries over between turns and a bigger board leaves room to grow, cards are easier to afford and Arete flows faster. So almost every card now costs more. This is not a nerf aimed at anyone's deck: it is the whole economy scaling up to match, so that your choices keep their weight without anything...
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• Patch Notes·15 Aug 2026Official

  1.0.16 A New Domus Option

  Patch NotesAreteion v1.0.16General(Experimental) Added new function option for Domus: "Unblock all tiles". Only offered while you have blocked tiles. Domus also gained "Cannot be Blocked".Weather: Snow / Heavy Snow: 1 / 2 Power is charged once per card each round, the first time it moves, swaps or attacks. That card's later moves and its attack are free for the rest of the round (was 1 / 2 Power per move, per swap and per attack). Attacking an Elusive card still costs its 3 Power every time.Heavy Snow: Removed: "Start of turn: Block all Mountains." No weather blocks tiles now.Weather is rerolled every round and can roll the same weather again (was a 60% chance each round to keep the current weather, mistakenly also applied to heavy weather). Rounds spent in Sunny now: ~52% → 65%. Rain and Storms now apply to neutral cards: Barbarians, Pirate Ships, animals and monsters have their Movement capped the same way, and take Storm damage after they move. Moves out of a card's own text, such as an Illyrian repositioning after attacking, take no Storm damage.Veil of Ignorance (Athena): Added: "2 / 4 / 6 / 8 explored tiles away from your cards become unexplored." Tiles holding one of your cards, and tiles next to or diagonally next to one, are never picked.The Golden Throne (Hephaestus): Characters blocked: 2 / 4 / 6 / 8 → 1 / 2 / 3 / 4Damage: 0 / 0 / 1 / 2 → 1 / 2 / 3 / 4Bug FixesCoroneia Sanctuary (Hermes): Its restriction now checks the Sanctuary's own cost, not how much Power you have left. It can be played whenever its cost is 5 or less. It also counts itself among the cards played at a reduced cost when it is played, instead of only from the end of that turn.Cost reductions now only target cards that still cost something, and stop once every card in hand is free, instead of playing out its remaining reductions on 0 cost cards.Peitho, Lady of Persuasion (Aphrodite): Barbarians, animals and monsters taken control of now move as your own cards do. They no longer move on th...
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• Patch Notes·14 Aug 2026Official

  1.0.15 Big AI Update & Board UI Overhaul

  Comprehensive AI ReworkAll two-player modes have been reworked. The AI enemy is now always drawn from a set of 120 pre-built decks. Each deck also has a new difficulty scaling on top consisting of a flat Arete advantage and a fixed number of additional blessings the AI receives throughout the game. Through simulated self-play all the decks and their difficulty levels have been assigned a rating. In versus AI the player now also gets one rating per Olympian with an associated leaderboard (tracking rating, not levels)Hero's Journey no longer has a raw bonus scaling for its opponents, rather the rating of the opponents simply rises throughout the run. This will require a lot of difficulty tuning, but to me this is already MUCH more fun than before. Patch NotesAreteion v1.0.15AI ChangesImproved raw playing strength slightly.Versus AI ratings: Versus AI no longer has levels or strikes. Each Olympian carries a rating instead, starting at 1200 and moving with every game you play with a deck of that Olympian. Beating a higher rated opponent gains you more rating, losing to a lower rated one costs you more, and ratings swing hard until you have played enough games with that Olympian, then settle.Versus AI rewards: Winning a game that pushes your rating past the next milestone awards cards, at most one milestone per game. Milestones start 50 rating apart and narrow toward 25: 1250, 1298, 1344, 1388, 1430 and so on.Versus AI leaderboards: Every Olympian has its own Versus AI leaderboard. The old single Versus AI leaderboard stays visible as Versus AI (Retired) and no longer receives scores.Enemy decks: Versus AI and Hero's Journey both draw from the same roster of 120 built enemy decks, one per Epic and Mythological character and led by that character. Only decks whose Olympians you have discovered appear, and each deck always fields the cards it was built with. AI opponents: Every AI opponent starts with +1 Might and 2 extra cards in hand, in every mode it plays, at every AI ...
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• Announcements·12 Aug 2026Official

  1.0.14 Weather

  WeatherWeather has been reworked to have less of an impact on the game. It now primarily targets movement and should still feel impactful, but further tuning might be necessary. As a consequence of the waether changes all games will now start with 3 Power, no light rain 2 Power starts are possible anymore. Olympian CursesSome curses still were quite forceful on their lowest severity, this is explicitly how it is not supposed to work. When enough favor is accumulated, now all curse effects should really feel mild.Patch NotesAreteion v1.0.14FeaturesSelecting a card on the board under any weather other than Sunny shows a hint above it stating that weather's effect.End of game screen: next to Next Game there is now Modify Deck, which opens the deck you just played in the deck builder. Playing a Standard or Random deck shows Copy & Modify Deck instead, which saves a copy of that deck first; it only appears if you own every card in that deck.Deck builder: an open deck now has Play Solo and Play Versus buttons that jump straight to that mode with the deck selected.Windowed mode remembers the window size, position and maximized state, and restores them on the next launch. Minimum window size is 1024x640.BalanceGifts of NatureLaurel Tree, Oak Tree, Poppies, Willow Tree, Garlic: buffs now only affect characters you control, and single-target ones always pick the highest Arete adjacent character.WeatherRemoved Light Rain. Medium Rain renamed to Rain.Removed all round restrictions on weather: every weather can roll in any round, including round 1.Roll weights: Rain 5% → 15%, Storm 3% → 5%, Heavy Storm 2% → 2.5%, Snow 3% → 5%, Heavy Snow 2% → 2.5%. Sunny 65% and Heavy Rain 5% unchanged.Sunny: no effect (was +1 Power).Rain / Heavy Rain: Start of turn, Movement of cards you control is reduced to 2 / 1. Movement gained later that turn is unaffected (was Power −1/−2).Storm: Start of turn, Movement of cards you control is reduced to 2. After a card you control moves, deal 1 damage to...
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• Announcements·9 Aug 2026Official

  1.0.13 Overdraw, Salient, Poseidon Rework & Initial AI Changes

  Patch NotesAreteion v1.0.13OverdrawSo far, drawing with a full hand was always just skipped, which led to lots of frustration and confusion. Now drawing an 8th card will be possible, but immediately afterward a choice will force the player to offer one of the 8 cards in hand to the Olympians. Only then, further effects will continue to run.AIAI now uses a completely new neural network based strategy. Its playing strength should be slightly increased. Its "personality" may differ substantially. In some situations it will play better, in some worse. Further AI improvements have become much more achievable and will hopefully ship in the next few patches. For now, no difficulty settings or AI bonuses have been altered. There will be a big rebalancing effort as soon as substantially stronger AI opponents are available. Salient KeywordAdded the Salient keyword, it is like Wild but with NO restrictions on the opponent's territory. It will allow a select few cards to directly challenge the opponent as soon as they are played, mostly with additional restrictions placed on the card to balance it.PoseidonThanks again for the great feedback on this issue, see the community discussions for more. This patch tries to significantly increase Poseidon's play options. Pirates now always spawn in versus matches and most of the time in Hero's Journey matches (visible before the challenge is selected). This makes fighting pirates a valid strategy. To balance it out, ship combat strength has been reduced across the board.Epibates are now Salient and some ships reward the player with additional copies. This should make an invasion from the sea a good aggressive playstyle option. Map generation has been fixed, there should now no longer be any maps with two disconnected seas.AresExtremely aggressive play has been nerfed. Military Camp can no longer be used as an outpost, it is now just a heal. FeaturesAI strategy changed to neural network.Added the Salient keyword: can be placed outside you...
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