🌱 Beginner Guide - Your First Invasion Runs

Play the free Steam demo before launch — it teaches the full loop and your progress transfers to the full game. In-run, the beginner priority is simple: keep your dice aligned in pairs while you learn each commander's starter perk, spend Budges before Chrono, and draft units that score reliably over units that look big. The game is a roguelike, so early runs are for learning which resource your commander scales.

• Turn start: engine effects fire (The Mothership's +1 Budge, Amalgram's +3 Mini Dice, Frugivore's Apple spawn).
• Roll your dice row — base dice feed columns, and special dice (the Kraken Die) join if your commander adds them.
• Place and align: pairs, triples and quadruples ignite combos; placement columns decide which artifacts get XP.
• Spend Budges to fine-tune the throw; spend Chrono to reroll the roll or restock the shop for new units.
• Score: units fire with their STR, artifacts level up, and your attack score climbs.

The Captain is the demo's tutorial-friendly pick: his The Mothership perk hands you +1 Budge every turn and teaches you how pairs feed artifact columns. Blob Girl is the "numbers go up" alternative — she floods the board with Mini Dice and scales whether or not your placement is clean. Both are playable in the demo today; see the commanders hub for every revealed kit.

• Hoarding Chrono forever — unspent rerolls are unspent scaling, especially with Eon Moss-style spend rewards.
• Ignoring column placement — artifact XP flows through columns, not through the whole board.
• Drafting big units with no engine — a unit is worth its current STR times how often your engine scores it.
• Breaking pairs to chase quads too early — the combo ladder is pairs to triples to quadruples.
• Treating luck as the enemy — Budges and Chrono exist precisely so a bad roll becomes a good turn.