Sylvan Tactics Goes Digital: Building a Forest of Possibilities

Since day one, Sylvan Tactics has been about doing more with less. A single chess board. A handful of familiar pieces. One custom deck of cards. From those simple ingredients, we've been crafting a deep and strategic woodland battle.

Now we're excited to announce that a fully custom, standalone digital version of Sylvan Tactics is in development for PC, with plans to launch on Steam. This version will take the core concepts of the game and enhance them with all the power and polish a digital platform can offer. It's still the same idea at heart, but this time the rules can come to life around you.

What Makes the Digital Version Different?

In the physical version, players track things like Sigil usage, move and attack limits, and card costs by hand. In the digital version, the system handles all of that automatically, letting players focus entirely on tactics and strategy without any mental overhead.

Some of the new features include:

• On-board overlays for Strength values, ability previews, valid moves, and attack ranges

• Icons showing which pieces have moved, invoked, or are wounded

• Cards in your hand automatically gray out if you don't have enough Sigils to play them

• Hovering over a piece reveals its art, stats, and ability text

• Auto-refreshing of Sigils and units at the start of each turn

• Streamlined deployment of Pawns and the Queen as hand cards based on current game state

• Auto-invoking Sigils when playing cards, making moves, or declaring attacks

All the strategic decisions remain intact. The digital version simply makes them easier to see, manage, and act on.

Designed to Teach and Invite

We know most people haven’t played Sylvan Tactics yet. That’s why we’re building the digital version to be an approachable and intuitive entry point. With clear prompts, smart visual feedback, and elegant automation, it lowers the learning curve and keeps games moving at a satisfying pace.

And we’re not stopping there.

An early screenshot of the Tabletopia version of Sylvan Tactics.

We also plan to release versions of the game on Tabletopia and Tabletop Simulator. These platforms are great for remote playtesting and community games, but they come with limitations. They can’t support the same level of automation or customization as a fully coded experience. The Steam version, on the other hand, lets us bring the game’s design philosophy to life in full detail.

A Free Gateway to the Sylvan World

To encourage more people to discover the world of Sylvan Tactics, we’re making the base digital version completely free to play. That means all 86 core cards will be available at no cost on every platform we release on.

Why free? Because every digital version of Sylvan Tactics is ultimately designed to funnel players into the world of the game, building community and interest ahead of our upcoming Kickstarter for the physical version.

That physical version is our passion and our primary focus. It’s the version that can sit on your shelf, be played across a chessboard with a friend, and become a part of your regular game night lineup. The digital versions are a bridge to help more players reach that experience.

Room to Grow

If the digital version finds a wide audience, we’re open to exploring future paid expansions, including new cards, factions, or game modes that continue to build on the foundation we’ve created. But the core experience will always be free and focused on welcoming players into the Sylvan Tactics community.

We can't wait to share more. Follow along for updates, previews, and development news on Instagram, Bluesky, or join our Discord:

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Come explore the forest. Whether on your table or your screen, Sylvan Tactics is just getting started.

Lacuna Passage - Devlog #35 - Improvements to our terrain automation

Development is finally reaching the point where we are able to start placing content within our full-scale environment.

Our demo from the Game Developers Conference and the Midwest Game Developers Summit was effectively a test to ensure our tool set for terrain development was sufficient for the much larger scaled terrain that would be in the final game. The demo was approximately 5 square miles of terrain (though only a small part of it featured in the walkthrough) and now we are working with roughly 19 square miles of exploreable terrain for the final game. You can see a comparison below.

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Anyone who has worked with terrains in Unity knows that there are dozens of variables and settings to tweak to get things looking just right. Doing all that manually for 16 terrain tiles (as opposed to 4 in the demo terrain) was not an option. In order to scale up our workflow for iterating and improving this larger area we needed to automate as much of the process as possible.

There are plenty of tools on the Unity Asset Store that are built specifically for this purpose, but after evaluating many of them we realized that we needed something more tailored to our setup. So we began working on a custom Unity Editor Window.

To the left you will see a preview of our Full Terrain Manager. This custom editor allows us to update materials, detail textures, heightmaps, colormaps, normalmaps, splatmaps, and detailmaps with the press of a button rather than manually assigning them one at a time for each of our 16 terrain tiles. This cuts a 2+ hour process down to less than 15 minutes. So if you aren't a developer and just want to know what this means for Lacuna Passage, it means we will have more time to make the terrain in the game as stunning as possible.

The next step will be to get our terrain streaming ironed out so that only the terrain tiles that are needed are loaded for the player at their current location. Then we can begin placing some of the other assets we have been working on to make this feel like a truly expansive Mars landscape with the same level of detail and quality you saw in our smaller demo terrain.

That's it for today's devlog, but check back in a couple weeks to see another art update from Spencer and his progress on the Foundation base camp Greenhouse.