When you lose in this 'haunted board game', your builds become opponents for other players to fight asynchronously

Turnbound reveal trailer - PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct - YouTube

There's nothing quite like setting up a custom, intricate hell maze in a level editor, sending it to friends, and watching as they trounce it with minimal effort. Turnbound, which debuted at today's PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, is boxing up that unique brand of shame and delivering it to your door in the form of an asynchronous autobattler.

Visually, it's a board game where you place tiles on a grid. You start with a hero character—public domain sorts like Lewis Carroll's Alice and Robin Hood—and smack down synergistic combo pieces to take out opponents of increasing difficulty, drafting a build in-between battles. Being an autobattler, once you've decked out your board with trinkets and abilities, all you can do is watch and hope it comes out on top.

The catch is that the opponents you fight are board setups previous players had their souls "trapped" with, with asynchronous battles playing out similarly to Backpack Battles or Down With the Ship. Ideally you'll keep your own soul on hand with an ironclad build, and if you go undefeated long enough, you'll start raking in additional items for future drafts, cosmetics, and so on.

I haven't spent much time with autobattlers since that initial wave first bubbled up, so it's fun to see the genre embrace a variety of conceits and aesthetics. I especially like Turnbound's chunky wooden UI where you drag gems and tiles onto a diegetic board, even if I find it funny Alice and Sun Wukong are playing a haunted board game together. Alice's gothic sensibilities are well-documented, but I take Sun Wukong for more of a Blood on the Clocktower kind of guy.

If you like your autobattlers spooky, you can try out Turnbound's demo and wishlist the game on Steam.

Check out every game, trailer, and announcement in the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct.

Justin first became enamored with PC gaming when World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights 2 rewired his brain as a wide-eyed kid. As time has passed, he's amassed a hefty backlog of retro shooters, CRPGs, and janky '90s esoterica. Whether he's extolling the virtues of Shenmue or troubleshooting some fiddly old MMO, it's hard to get his mind off games with more ambition than scruples. When he's not at his keyboard, he's probably birdwatching or daydreaming about a glorious comeback for real-time with pause combat. Any day now...

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