The orcs in Oaks vs Orcs want your forest, and they’re bringing enough axes and angry little troops to make a decent attempt at taking it. Don’t worry, you’re not exactly defenceless though.
Chaos Theory Games has released a free demo for its upcoming roguelike strategy autobattler, where you’ll grow a forest kingdom one card at a time before sending your army out to deal with the next wave. Trees, troops, buildings, and rivers all have a part to play, and getting them in the right place can turn a fairly ordinary patch of woodland into something the orcs are going to have a much harder time cutting down.
You do all the planning, and your army gets to do the hitting.
Build Your Forest Before the Orcs Arrive
Each round starts with you adding to the kingdom. Cards give you new pieces to place on the grid, and where you put them matters just as much as what you pick. Units need to be positioned where they can actually help, buildings can support the rest of your setup, and the river running through the forest gives you another way to connect everything together.
You’re free to change where that river goes, bending it around the grid to carry bonuses downstream. Run it through one useful tile and everything further along can benefit. Find a few effects that work well together and you can keep passing those bonuses through the kingdom, building a chain that makes the next fight considerably easier.
You can even loop the river back around to keep the water moving through the same setup. There’s quite a lot riding on where you decide to dig a bend.
Once you’re finished building, the orcs arrive and the battle plays out automatically. Your troops move and fight for themselves, leaving you to watch the plan you just spent all that time putting together either tear through the incoming wave or fall apart rather quickly. If it goes badly, there’s always the next run.
The Seasons Keep Changing the Plan
You won’t necessarily be able to rely on the same tiles for an entire run either. Oaks vs Orcs moves through spring, summer, autumn, and winter, with each season changing the value of different parts of the battlefield. Something worth building around in one season might not be nearly as useful in another, so there’s a reason to keep moving things around rather than settling on one layout and leaving it there.
The current demo gives you two decks to play with across six campaigns and five difficulty levels, so there’s already plenty of room to try different setups and plenty of orcs to try them on.
Finding Something Crazy Is Part of the Fun
With cards, units, river bonuses, and seasonal effects all feeding into each other, Oaks vs Orcs gives you plenty of opportunities to find combinations that are much stronger than they first appear. Chaos Theory Games is expecting players to do exactly that.
The team has built a bot that can play thousands of runs, testing different cards and strategies to find the combinations that perform particularly well. It’s helping the developers balance the game, but they’re not looking to smooth away every powerful interaction players discover.
Putting together a build that gets a little out of hand is very much the point. There’ll be a lot more to experiment with once the full game arrives too. More than 100 cards are planned, alongside four campaigns, bosses, and an endless mode for anyone who wants to see how long their kingdom can keep the orcs out.
Oaks vs Orcs is currently aiming for a 2027 release, with the free demo available now on Steam.