Price Charming
A fairy-tale auto-battler card game
V0.1.0-alpha
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Shop phase. Buy hirelings (2g each) and spells (2g each) into your 8-card hand, drag them onto the 7-slot board (bench ↔ active), set potion prices, and resolve payday on certain rounds. Hit Start Battle when you're ready.
Action phase. Customers walk up to your stall and the 4-axis tug-of-war begins. Hirelings auto-cast on their timers, Quickcraft hirelings pulse out temp stock, Bewitch pulls customer focus, Knockoff bumps permanent stock after a sale. You can't rearrange the board here.
Every customer is decided by four axes: Focus, Type, Budget, Quality. Each customer spawns with their own priority order of these axes, shown on the customer card from top (most important) to bottom (least).
Axes are weighted: top = 4×, second = 3×, third = 2×, bottom = 1×. Leading just the top axis alone beats leading the two lowest, but loses to leading the other three (4 vs 3+2+1=6). Pay attention to each customer's ★-pip column — that's their priority.
Early resolve: as soon as one side holds a decisive lead (≥ 5 of the 10-point max), the customer buys immediately instead of idling until patience runs out. Stock 5 on Dusty Broom is no longer dead weight in the first few seconds.
Set a price per potion type (not per hireling). The bracket you can charge at is unlocked by max(combined stock, combined potency) across all your hirelings that sell that type — either stat alone suffices.
Bracket table:
The panel shows both stock and potency totals with the currently-driving stat highlighted. Status tells you exactly which stat is closest to the next tier.
Quickcraft xN — base stock is 0; after every cast, gain +N temporary stock (round-only).
Knockoff xN — after a sale, if your potency is below 10, gain +N permanent stock.
Haggle — sales from this hireling charge +3g above the posted price but cost −1 reputation each. Crooked Confessor on any active slot waives the rep penalty.
Bewitch — every cast pushes the customer's Focus axis for the player (+40 per customer targeted) and tags the customer. After this hireling sells to a Bewitched customer, its next Bewitch targets an additional customer (max 2 at a time).
Sabotage — slows an opponent's cast. (Not yet wired in this build — coming in Part-2 Phase 3.)
Paydays resolve on rounds 5, 8, 11, 14. Each non-starter hireling demands a wage based on their tier (Low 2g / Medium 4g / High 6g as starters) that grows by +2g every payday they survive.
A hireling acquired on a payday round skips that round's wage (fresh hirelings don't owe retroactively). A hireling is only ever billed once per payday round, even if it's caught up multiple pay cycles.
Per hireling you can Pay (deduct gold) or Sell (return to pool, +1g).
Owning 3 copies of the same hireling with the same potion type — across hand, board, and bench in any combination — instantly merges them into a Charmed hireling (stats summed, cast time from base). Plays into your hand with a random Charm card attached.
Reputation starts at 0 and climbs with every sale (customer stars − 1 if Haggled). Reach 100 reputation to win outright. Otherwise, at round 15 you win if you beat the opponent's customer count.
The Show Off menu item on the title screen displays every card you've ever had in your hand or on your board, across every game. Undiscovered cards show as dashed outlines with a "?" — tap any unlocked card to read its full ability and keywords.