Verdigris Cloister

A garden at the end of the world. The floor you fight on grows between every turn.

Nobody has pruned the great glasshouse since the roof cracked. The seed trays still hold water and the water still holds seed, so the hall keeps growing whether or not anyone is left to eat from it — and it has begun to grow the other thing as well.

You command four gardener-monks of the Ordo Claustri Aeruginosi. The Blight does not need to kill you to win: it wins by covering the greenhouse. Chase kills and ignore the floor and you lose the room.

What makes it different

Between every round, the garden takes its own turn. Creepvine spreads and becomes half cover. Root-knot swells and heaves a tile a step higher. Thornbed creeps out and bites whatever ends its turn standing in it. Bloomstalk opens and heals what stands beside it. Lightwood grows tall and takes a sightline with it. Then the Blight grows by exactly the same grammar.

So the perfect position you took this turn is a bad one in two turns' time, and half your play is deciding what the ground should become — sowing cover ahead of an advance, flooding a row to stop a spread, setting a lane alight to clear a shot.

There is no clock anywhere. No timers, no real-time meters. The game waits while you think, indefinitely.

How to play

• Hover a tile to read it. The panel under the board names the ground, its cover, who is standing on it, and what it becomes next round.
• Click an ability in the bar along the bottom — Move, Strike, Overwatch, Sow, Burn, Flood, the active monk's own signature, or Hold.
• Click a highlighted tile to spend the action there. Movement previews its path and its AP cost before you commit; a shot cannot be taken back.
• Each monk has two action points a turn.
• End Turn passes to the next figure in the order of the turn, along the top of the screen. When the last one has acted, the round closes and everything growing on the board moves at once.

The four

Brother Anselm	Pruner	Cut Back — clears growth, and what stands in it
Sister Meridia	Sower	Broadcast — sows three tiles at range at once
Brother Cassian	Waterwright	Open the Line — floods a row from the brass pipes
Sister Vespera	Lanternkeeper	Kindle — sets a tile alight

They speak. Every line is delivered aloud and printed on screen.

Worth seeing

• The board four rounds in, when the vines have closed and the black-violet crystal has taken a quarter of the floor. The colour contrast alone tells you who is winning.
• The tile inspector's herbarium plates — every plant and every form the Blight takes is drawn as a pressed specimen.
• Warm light coming down through the cracked roof, into vapour and drifting spores, in a frame that is taller than it is wide.

Four rooms: the Propagation Hall, the Brass Nave, the Fern Vault and the Heart Chamber.