Forgekeeper

TL;DR chess if it was invented by dwarves.

Background

This game was made for the 2025 Pixel Game Jam whose theme was "From the Dead". I've been interested in diegetic games (like Gwent and Inscryption) and wanted to try making my own. I'm not sure how it ultimately turned into fighting zombie-ghost dwarves, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out :)

How to play

The object of the game is to summon your Forgekeeper, move them to the center square, and hold it for 1 turn. If you do this, you win! If your opponent does this, you lose. Also, the Forgekeeper can be captured. If you capture your opponent's Forgekeeper, you win! If yours is captured, you lose.

More information than is probably necessary:

You might be able to figure out the rest just by playing so feel free to stop reading here. But here's some extra info just in case.

• Blue goes first, red goes second. Alternate turns until someone wins.
• Like in chess, select the piece (dwarf) you want to move, then move it.
• Each player starts with a Tunneler. You can summon other dwarves, but each time you summon will require spending 2 tiles. Summoning a dwarf counts as your turn.
• You collect tiles by mining. The Tunneler, the Sapper, and the Runepriest are the only dwarves capable of collecting tiles.
• There are only 2 kinds of tiles: Stone (◯) and Rune (ᚱ).
• Tiles on the board are face-down. When you mine a tile, it gets added to your hand and its type is revealed. Similar to a card game, you can see what's in your hand, but you can't see what's in your opponent's hand (only how many tiles your opponent has).
• Tiles are used for 3 things:
  • The Tunneler needs a Stone tile for its cave-in ability.
  • The Runepriest needs a Rune tile for its rune-blast ability.
  • Summoning a dwarf costs 2 tiles. You can mix and match Stone and Rune tiles; it just needs to be a total of 2.
• Rune tiles are a bit rarer than Stone tiles. Finding a Rune tile has the same probability of finding a face card in a standard deck of cards (Stone tiles = 2-10).
• There are 7 kinds of dwarves, each with their own movement and abilities. You only get one of each type. Once your Tunneler is captured for example, it's out of the game.
• The "Summon" menu explains how each piece moves and what their special abilities are. Click an ability to learn more about it.

Hopefully that's clear as mud. Leave a comment if I can help with anything else.

Thank you for taking the time to check this out. I hope you enjoy the game!

-B

Attribution

• The dwarves' sprites are remixes of sprites found in Spacefox's Dwarf Fortress graphics pack: https://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=129219.0
• The pixel font is a slightly tweaked version of this bitmap font from danthedev: https://opengameart.org/content/8x8-1bit-roguelike-tiles-bitmap-font
• Sounds were created with jsfxr: https://sfxr.me/
• Generative AI was NOT used to produce any of the code or assets in this game.