D.A.M.N!

This game grew out of years my family spent playing the German classic. Its substance is our own wish to make it deeper and less ruled by luck. Its centerpiece: a unique card mode paired with piece classes, that made it genuinely team-based and deeply tactical, all the way to tournament-level competition.

Rules you shape

Out of respect for the classic and the players who love it, two of the four ready-made rule sets keep pure classic play untouched. But for anyone who finds even four variants "not enough," or just wants to tweak the game to their taste, it breaks down into about 25 atoms that let you flexibly tune the depth and complexity to whoever you're playing with this time.

Even for the classic, you can choose what earns an extra move, whether there are safe zones and how many, and so on. Want more depth? Add classes with passive abilities, ults on top, and set exactly when they recharge.

There's even a Peace mode atom for the youngest at the table, the ones who might get upset when a piece one step from the finish gets knocked all the way back.

The card mode

Our key twist is the card mode. It's one of the atoms, so you can mix it even into the classic rules, but it's the DAMN Cards preset where, we think, it became a game of its own. Everyone plays the same deck: movement cards, action cards (some of them very strong!), and junk cards you'd rather avoid. The card mode also has three difficulty levels that control how many junk cards clog the deck.

And the Scout class becomes your filter against them, which pays off most at higher difficulty. You only ever see your next five cards on your own turn, which made it easy to let several players share one device. In fact, that's how we tested it most often, as a family ;). It doesn't matter that your rivals see the cards you're about to play: it's only your wits and attention that decide how well you use them. And you'll see, your opponents will hold their breath watching whether you spotted a combo that hurts them, and they'll gladly tease you when you miss one.

Worlds, inhabitants, and classes

The game already has several atmospheric worlds, and you can play in the setting of any of them. Each world brings its own ambient sounds, music, and race.

Races are an animated cosmetic skin for the classic pieces: in gameplay terms they give no advantage. More worlds and races are planned. What does change the game is the classes, which you can switch on for any race. They define what a piece can always do (passives) and which active abilities you can trigger situationally (ults). Right now there are 4 classes (Tank, Saboteur, Underdog, and Scout),

and they add up to two layers of depth: you can play with passives alone, which is already its own experience, and once you add ults on top, which you must learn to recharge in time, the game becomes both harder and deeper at once.

Mix players however you like

One game can hold online players, hot-seat players, and bots together. You can add a hot-seat player to any online seat, and bots come in three difficulty levels. If someone drops for a moment, a bot steps into their seat so nobody waits, and they take it back the moment they return.

Save and pick up anywhere

The game auto-saves at the start of every turn, on every player's device at once. So even if the power cuts out for everyone at the same moment, you can restore the match from anyone's auto-save and lose no more than a single turn. Start on one device and finish on several, or the other way around. Didn't finish a game around the table? Pick it back up online by joining the room's save by invitation. And link your own devices together to pull saves between them straight from the cloud.

Stats and awards

The game counts everything, and shows no less. Successful plays light up right in the match: your first knockout, your first piece home, a capture on a rival you just rocketed into, and plenty more.

After every match, a post-game window opens automatically with the highlights for each player: knockouts, losses, rockets, freezes, distance, points...

And from the main menu there's a separate window with your all-time stats, aggregated across games, where you can also revisit the history of matches you've played.

And, fittingly for "Outsmart, not outdice!" dice modes include a fairness check across three measures: the average roll, how evenly the faces came up, and how long the same-face streaks ran. No "the game is rigging it," just the utmost honesty and transparency, shown in plain numbers.

On top of that, the game already collects points for your successful plays, and the option to spend them on cosmetics is planned for future releases.

Play, counter-play, co-op

Here, almost every move has an answer.

• You can knock out anyone except the Tank. But even the Tank goes home if it takes out a Saboteur.

• An active ult shields the whole team. Knock out the piece that cast it, though, and the shield drops from all the rest.

• The Underdog can hand its ult to a teammate so they roll the number they desperately need, unless you take the Underdog out first.

• Spent a powerful ult and waiting for its recharge card? A partner can help, if that card reaches them first ;).

• Freeze an enemy piece and it can't move for a turn (you can still knock it out, and your partner can capitalize on that ;)), but you can still thaw your own pieces or your partner's with rocket hits.

• The "Block Actions" card shuts off every enemy action card for a turn: no swaps, no teleports at the worst possible moment.

Outsmart, not outdice!