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Pawnbarian
Pawnbarian is a quick-playing, turn-based puzzle roguelike. Play cards to move your hero like a chess piece, and conquer challenging dungeons full of cunning monsters!
What players say
Steam review score and the most-helpful voices, which may include critical ones. Score via Steam as of 2026-09-02 · quoted reviews as of 2026-05-13.
“Pawnbarian by j4nw is a deceptively compact tactical roguelike that manages to extract remarkable depth from a very focused set of ideas. It takes the familiar rules of chess and reframes them into a turn-based dungeon crawler where every move carries weight, transforming what…”
— a player, Steam review · 18 hrs played“I like it! It feels quick to play, but I'm super annoyed by the blight and immunity. Like with all deck-builder roguelikes, you need to synergize as much as possible to get free turns and hits so you don't get overwhelmed by the enemy's buffs. Planning is everything here. PS,…”
— a player, Steam review · 2 hrs played“Simple game, lacks a little juice and some mechanics rnt explained enough (specifically the character who uses completely different rules) but the combat is pretty fun”
— a player, Steam review · 1 hrs playedPlayer activity
Monthly average concurrent players. Live data self-collected from the Steam API · history through 2026-06 via SteamCharts.
Achievement stats
Global completion rates across all Steam players — a data view of how far people actually get. Source: Steam official stats · as of 2026-09-05.
Price tracking
US-region pricing (USD), sampled twice daily by our own tracker since 2026-07-25. Steam prices vary by region — always confirm your local price on Steam.
Regional prices at last sample, in local currency — Steam sets each region's price independently.
Cheapest → most expensive, converted to USD at ECB reference rates (2026-09-10). Relative comparison only.
Latest official news
Developer announcements via the Steam news API — links go to the original posts. More across all games on the news hub.
1.2.14 - Maintenance Update
Hello, long time no hear in this news section! In particular to the new players from the Spring Sale, as well as from the current Checkmate! Humble Bundle. This is a maintenance fix that addresses iss
Attention Steam Deck / Linux Players - Force Proton!
Hey everyone, It appears a recent Steam Deck update broke the native build of Pawnbarian - the game launches, but isn't playable. I can't check right now, but I assume the same is true for Linux on re
1.2.11
new: Latin-American Spanish localization (thanks Diego Hernández!) new: Ukrainian localization (thanks Lacki23!) change: small update to the French localization (thanks Wok!) change: small update to t
1.2.10
Yo! The demo version is available again. It didn't sit right with me that the game's mobile version has a free demo available and the Steam one doesn't, so I spent some time tweaking the game to creat
Pawnbarian is one year old
...and I'm holding a record low 50% off sale to celebrate! I have no surprise patches prepared, but as a small treat, check out this lovely piece I comissioned from my buddy SquareAnon . It's sized ex
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Screenshots
Official Steam store screenshots — click any shot to enlarge.
Facts & details
From the Steam store record, snapshot 2026-05-13.
| Genres | Indie, Strategy |
| Player tags | Rogue-like · Turn-Based Combat · Chess · Card Game · Puzzle · Rogue-lite · Board Game · Strategy · Card Battler · Turn-Based Tactics · Turn-Based Strategy · Mouse only (SteamSpy community voting) |
| Features | Single-player · Steam Achievements · Full controller support · Steam Trading Cards · Steam Cloud · Remote Play on Phone · Remote Play on Tablet · Remote Play on TV |
| Languages | English, Polish, French, Portuguese - Brazil, Spanish - Spain, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Swedish, Italian, Japanese, Danish, Hungarian, Korean, Russian, Bulgarian, Finnish, Serbian, Spanish - Latin America… |
| Controller | Full support |
| Achievements | 18 |
| Official site | https://j4nw.com/pawnbarian |
Minimum system requirements (PC)
Minimum: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS *: Windows 7 SP1+ Processor: SSE2 support DirectX: Version 10 Storage: 200 MB available space