New Player Guide: Getting Started

Welcome to Spirefall. This is the first post in a series for new players. Each one covers a piece of the game in plain terms: what it is, how it works, and what to do first. This one gets you from the main menu to your first win.

What kind of game this is

Spirefall is a card game. You and your opponent each command a fortress. Your fortress has hit points, and in front of those hitpoints can be shields, but not all fortresses or opponents you encounter will have them. Play units, send them across the board, and drop the enemy fortress to zero before yours goes down. That is the whole win condition.

The demo is built around the Tavern Gauntlet: a run of nine tables against tavern regulars, ending at the Keeper. You pick a faction, take a seat, and play until you win the board or lose a match. Losing once ends the run, but everything you learned and unlocked stays with you.

Start with the tutorial

Pick Tutorial from the main menu. Guild Master Tully runs you through three short battles, and the game pauses to explain each new idea as it comes up: deploying units, what the shield on your fortress does, why fresh units can't attack right away, how blocking works, and what "pass priority" means.

The tutorial takes about ten minutes and it pays for itself twice. First, finishing it unlocks LuEllen Trax, a second commander for your starting faction. Second, if you skip it, your first run starts with a qualifier table where Tully teaches you the same lessons anyway. You can pay him 25 gold to skip that too, but he'll be waiting at the start of your next run. The Gauntlet wants you to know the basics, one way or another.

Your first run

From the menu, hit Play. You'll land on the setup screen where you choose your banner. At the start you have one faction, the Archmage Technocrats: arcane engineers with drones, constructs, and direct damage. Pick your commander and fortress, then take a seat.

A few things worth knowing going in:

• Your fortress starts at 20 HP (some might have less, others more), and damage carries from table to table. If you scrape through a fight at 6 HP, you start the next one at 6 HP. Archmage shields recharge inbetween encounters. You can never drop below 1 between tables, but protect your fortress like the run depends on it, because it does.
• You start with 50 gold. You'll earn more at every table and spend it in shops on cards, consumables, and removing cards you don't want.
• After most battles you pick one of three cards to add to your deck. Your 15-card starter grows into something bigger over the run.

Controls

Everything works with the mouse. If you like hotkeys: D deploys your commander, Q through R fire your fortress abilities, S recharges your shield, and Space passes priority. Controllers work too, and the Settings screen has the full table of keyboard and gamepad bindings.

That's enough to get playing. The next posts cover how encounters are put together, how a turn actually flows, and where all the unlocks come from.