- Titanium Court is a strategy roguelike that splits each turn into a High Tide (match three coloured tiles in a line for resources) and a Low Tide (spend those resources to deploy soldiers or farmers).
- It won the IGF 2026 Seumas McNally Grand Prize and the Excellence in Design award on April 23, 2026, and is currently 20% off on Steam at around $16.
- If you like Into the Breach's tight tactical loops or Slay the Spire's deckbuilding momentum, the genre fusion will feel familiar — just weirder, with mountains you can place to slow enemies down.
- Beginners should pick a single Court archetype, ignore the side jobs on run one, and accept that losing track of what each rival Court does is normal in your first three runs.
Why I'm Writing This Before Playing
A small honest note up front. I haven't bought Titanium Court yet. I usually play a game for at least a few hours before writing anything about it on LevelWalks, but this one won the IGF 2026 Seumas McNally Grand Prize five days ago and the wave of "what is this game" searches is happening right now. Waiting two weeks until I have a full personal playthrough means writing into an empty room.
So this isn't a walkthrough. It's a buyer's-side explainer based on the past few days reading the Kotaku, PC Gamer, and AVClub reviews, watching about three hours of gameplay clips on YouTube, and going through the Steam Community discussions. If you're trying to figure out what kind of game this actually is before spending around $16, that's what I can help with right now. The deeper walkthrough comes after I've put real time into a save file.
What Is Titanium Court?
Titanium Court is a strategy roguelike from solo developer AP Thomson, published by Fellow Traveller (the same label behind Citizen Sleeper and Going Under). It launched on Steam on April 23, 2026, after several years of festival demos. You play as one of several rival "Courts" — strange, semi-allegorical factions — competing for territory across procedurally arranged battles.
The structural twist is that every turn splits into two phases. In High Tide, you play a match-3 puzzle on a small grid to gather resources. In Low Tide, those resources get spent on soldiers (who fight), farmers (who gather more resources during combat), or terrain manipulation (placing mountains to slow enemies, for example). Win the engagement, advance the run, repeat with new modifiers and a new Court matchup.
It is, by genre tag, four things at once — match-3 puzzler, tower defense, roguelike, and tactical strategy. Reviewers have leaned on "surreal" and "story-heavy" to describe the tone. Looking at gameplay clips, the visual style is deliberately strange: hand-drawn courts, oddly proportioned soldiers, dreamlike colour palettes that shift between battles. Not the cosy aesthetic of most match-3 games.
How High Tide and Low Tide Actually Work
From watching about a dozen run videos, here's the loop as best I can describe it without having played a single match myself.
High Tide — the puzzle phase
A board of coloured tiles appears, similar to Bejeweled or Puzzle Quest, but smaller and turn-based. You match tiles in lines of three (or longer) to generate resources. Each tile colour maps to a different resource type — wood, stone, food, gold (the names vary by Court archetype). PC Gamer's review noted that High Tide rewards setting up cascading matches rather than just chasing the longest line, because chains push you over key resource thresholds for the next phase.
Low Tide — the deployment phase
Resources from High Tide convert into deployable units in Low Tide. Soldiers cost more but engage enemy Courts directly. Farmers are cheap and gather extra resources during combat, but they're vulnerable. Terrain pieces — placing mountains, trenches, or walls — cost a different resource type and shape how enemies move toward you. The Kotaku review specifically called out the "arrange mountains near your court to slow enemies" decision as the single mechanic that makes Titanium Court click for some players.
The interlock
What makes the loop interesting (and what I'm most curious to feel for myself) is that the match-3 board persists between turns within an engagement. So weak High Tide turns leave the board in awkward states for next round. Strong cascades clear the board and refresh it favorably. There's a feedback loop between puzzle skill and tactical resourcing that doesn't exist in most match-3 RPGs, where the puzzle phase usually runs on its own track.
Match-3 vs Roguelike vs Tower Defense — Which Wins?
If you're trying to figure out which of your existing favourite games Titanium Court most resembles, here's a rough comparison drawn from the gameplay clips and reviews. I'd take this with a grain of salt — genre comparisons get fuzzier the more hybrid a game is, and Titanium Court is unusually hybrid.
| Game | Phase Loop | Run Length | Comeback Potential |
|---|---|---|---|
| Titanium Court | Match-3 → deploy → battle (interlocked) | ~45-60 min | High — strong cascade can swing a losing engagement |
| Into the Breach | Pure tactical grid (no resource sub-phase) | ~30-40 min | Low — every move telegraphed, mistakes compound |
| Slay the Spire | Card draw → play → resolve (deckbuilder) | ~60-90 min | Moderate — depends on deck synergy not turn timing |
| Puzzle Quest | Match-3 → spell trigger (independent phases) | ~10-15 min per battle | High — single match cascade can finish opponent |
The closest cousin is probably Puzzle Quest in pure mechanic terms, but Titanium Court adds a deployment layer Puzzle Quest doesn't have, plus the roguelike run structure that Puzzle Quest definitely doesn't have. The closest cousin in feel is probably Into the Breach — that same sense of "every decision matters and the board state is small enough to think about completely" — except with a puzzle phase grafted onto the front of every turn.
Why It Won the IGF Grand Prize
The Independent Games Festival's Seumas McNally Grand Prize is the top award at IGF and goes to one game per year out of hundreds of entries. Titanium Court won it at the 2026 ceremony, plus the Excellence in Design award, and was nominated in two more categories.
Reading between the lines of the reviews, the consensus is that the genre fusion isn't a gimmick — the High Tide and Low Tide phases meaningfully feed into each other rather than feeling like two separate games stapled together. AVClub called it "a most rare video game vision," which is the kind of phrase reviewers reach for when they can't easily compare a game to anything else. ScreenHub said it "defies description," same idea.
The Fellow Traveller publishing fingerprint matters here too. They lean toward unusual narrative-leaning indie projects (In Other Waters, Citizen Sleeper, Paradise Killer), so a strategy roguelike with story emphasis fits their catalogue exactly. If you trust their curation, that's a useful signal on its own.
Should You Buy It Right Now?
The Steam launch discount of 20% drops the price to roughly $16 from the $20 base. That window typically closes about a week after release, so by early May you'll likely be paying full price.
Here's how I'd think about it depending on your taste:
- If you already love Into the Breach or Slay the Spire, the genre overlap is strong enough that buying at launch discount makes sense. The interlocked match-3 layer is the new thing you'd be paying to experience.
- If you've bounced off match-3 games before, this probably isn't the one that converts you. The puzzle phase is genuinely about line-matching skill, not just window dressing.
- If you mostly play casual mobile puzzlers, the strategy and roguelike layers will likely feel heavy. The reviews specifically mention some players "losing track of how different courts worked" — there's a learning curve.
- If you're on the fence, the demo from earlier festival circuits is still up on the Steam store page. About 45 minutes of playtime should tell you whether the loop clicks.
My personal call: I'm going to wait until the weekend, mostly because I have two other games I committed to finishing first. The 20% discount probably stays through early May based on Fellow Traveller's past launches, so the urgency isn't extreme.
What I'll Be Looking For When I Play
When I do start a save file, four things I'll specifically test before writing the deeper walkthrough:
- Does the board state really persist meaningfully? The interlocked match-3 / tactical loop is the headline mechanic. I want to know if a bad High Tide actually punishes you for two or three turns, or if the resource cost smooths it over.
- How distinct are the Court archetypes? Reviews mention multiple Courts with different styles. I'll start three runs with three different Courts and see if the strategic feel shifts substantially or just nominally.
- Where does the difficulty curve sit? First three runs are usually "learning the systems." I'll track when the first genuine challenge run appears and whether the difficulty ramps from there.
- Is the story actually doing anything? AVClub and ScreenHub mention the surrealism and the narrative weight. I want to see if it integrates with the mechanics or sits beside them.
Once I've got 8-10 hours in and a few completed runs, I'll publish the full walkthrough with deck-building advice, Court-by-Court strategies, and the deeper combat patterns. Sub-optimal opening moves, breakpoint resource thresholds, the works. Probably mid-May based on my actual play schedule.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Titanium Court hard for beginners?
Based on review consensus, the first two or three runs are genuinely confusing because you're learning the match-3 layer, the deployment layer, and the rival Court behaviors at the same time. Several reviewers mentioned getting overwhelmed early. The good news is that runs are short — roughly 45 to 60 minutes — so the cost of a failed learning run is low. Sticking with one Court archetype for the first few attempts is the most-cited beginner advice.
How long is a single run?
Roughly 45 to 60 minutes for a complete run, based on the gameplay videos I've watched. That's a middle ground between Into the Breach (typically 30-40 minutes) and Slay the Spire (60-90 minutes). Failed early runs end faster, sometimes in 15-20 minutes if you misread a Court matchup. Successful late-game runs can stretch past 90 minutes if you're playing carefully through the final battles.
Is it more like Bejeweled or Slay the Spire?
More like Slay the Spire in structure, more like Bejeweled in moment-to-moment input. You're managing a roguelike run with branching decisions, but the actual mechanic you're using to do that includes a match-3 puzzle on every turn. People who liked Puzzle Quest's match-3-plus-RPG combination will recognize the shape, except the meta-layer here is a roguelike strategy game rather than a JRPG.
When will the deeper walkthrough come?
After I've actually played enough to write something useful — probably mid-May, after I've completed a few full runs and tested at least three Court archetypes. The plan is one main beginner walkthrough plus two or three sibling guides covering specific Courts and the harder difficulty modes. I'll link them back to this page when they're up.
What platforms can I play it on?
Titanium Court launched on Steam (Windows and Mac) on April 23, 2026. There's no console or mobile release announced yet, though Fellow Traveller has historically brought their catalogue to Switch within six to twelve months of PC launch. If you're hoping for a Steam Deck experience specifically, the gameplay clips suggest it should run well — the visual style isn't graphics-heavy and the controls are mostly point-and-click.
Jim Liu runs LevelWalks and writes puzzle game guides from a small flat in Sydney. He's covered Brain Test, Monument Valley 3, Block Blast, and roughly 40 other puzzle games over the past few months. Most are walkthroughs written after actually playing through; this one is a pre-purchase explainer because the IGF win deserved a same-week response. The full walkthrough is coming after he's put real time into a save file.
