Idlery

Playable online

Tabletop edition in development

Karnwold

Build a village worth defending. Fortify it before the third round opens. Be the stronghold still standing when the sieges end.

Play Karnwold Read the rules
Karnwold running in a browser: four players’ circular villages laid out on a dark table, with a build panel listing Village Center, Farmhouse, Market, Barracks and Wall.

The game

Everything you build is something you will have to hold

Karnwold is a turn-based strategy game for two to five players. Each player raises a village, and every turn is the same question asked differently: spend now on the thing that pays you back, or on the thing that keeps you alive when someone comes for you.

Income arrives, pieces go down, and villages grow. From the third round the sieges open, and the game stops being about what you have built and starts being about what survives. The last stronghold standing wins.

  • Farmhouse

    Harvest and supply — the food that keeps everything else running.

  • Market

    Trade and gold. The quarter that pays for the other three.

  • Wall

    Hold the line. Nothing behind it matters if it does not.

  • Barracks

    Raise your troops, for the sieges you launch and the ones you weather.

Play it now

The online prototype

Karnwold plays in the browser today, free and with nothing to install. Take a seat against the built-in bots, pass one device around a table, or play online against other people. It is an evolving prototype and it says so — the rules and the interface both still move.

A Karnwold game in round three: four circular villages with pieces placed, a card row reading Gold, Supply, Sorcerer and Discard, an action panel with Build, Buy, Troops, Cards and Siege tabs, and a resource bar showing health, gold, supply and moves.
Four villages mid-game, with the build panel open.
Play Karnwold Development updates
The Karnwold board: a circular village divided into four labelled quarters — Farmhouse, Market, Wall and Barracks — around a central Village Center.

The board

Four quarters. One village to defend.

The board is a single village disc split into four quarters, with the Village Center in the middle. Pieces are modular — blocks, arches, roofs, towers, wall sections and banners — so a Farmhouse at stage three is a different object from a Farmhouse at stage one, and your village ends up looking like nobody else’s.

The Village Center is the thing you are really protecting. When it falls, so do you.

The physical game

Karnwold is being built for a real table

The online version came first because it is the fastest way to test whether the rules are any good. The intention has always been a physical edition: a printed board, moulded pieces, a proper card deck, and dice you can actually throw.

That work is under way — prototyping, artwork, playtesting and balancing, and the preparation manufacturing needs. It is not finished, there is no release date, and nothing here is for sale yet.

The Karnwold physical prototype laid out on a table: a circular board with Farmhouse, Market, Wall and Barracks quarters, white moulded village pieces, dice, and two card decks.
The prototypeBoard, pieces, cards and dice as they stand today.
A close-up of assembled Karnwold pieces — two arches flanking a roofed hall — beside a Gold card, a 1 Supply card and two dice.
Modular piecesBlocks, arches and roofs that stack into a building.
A Karnwold design spread: hand-drawn studies of the circular board layout, the modular build system, the sorcerer card deck and the resource flow, annotated and marked work in progress.
Design studies for the tabletop edition — marked, in the artist’s own hand, “early concepts, work in progress”.

Details

The essentials

Karnwold is an evolving prototype. Rules, balance and interface all still change between releases, and the development log at karnwold.com/updates is where those changes are written down.

The tabletop edition has no release date and is not on sale. Nothing on this page is a pre-order or a promise of one.

Play Karnwold

Karnwold is playable in your browser now, and the physical tabletop edition is still in development.

Play Karnwold Read the rules