Protectors of Balance - The Beginning

Torn from your world. Trapped in a high-tech bunker. Do whatever it takes to find a way back home.

Protectors of Balance: The Beginning is a tactical card-roguelite where everyday professionals are suddenly torn from modern reality into a mysterious subterranean complex. Use your real-world expertise to survive the bunker's own defense robots and unravel why you were brought here.

Free, in your browser, no download, and a prototype: one bunker, five classes, and fifteen to thirty minutes per run. How much further it gets built out depends on what you tell us.

The Story

You didn’t wake up from a dream, and you didn’t die. One second you were living your normal life — working your shift, solving code, or fixing circuits — and the next, you simply materialized inside a cold, sealed bunker facility. You don’t know who brought you here or why. You only know one thing: you need to find a way back home.

The bunker isn’t an alien invasion site; it is a claustrophobic maze guarded by a defense network that turned on the people it was built to protect. As you fight your way through the corridors, mysterious terminal logs and ancient signals hint at a deeper truth: you are a Protector, bound to a mandatory duty you don’t yet fully understand.

Surviving the bunker is just the first step. Beyond its steel doors lies a vast world where high technology intertwines with magic, and where ancient creatures await. But to ever see home again, you must first complete your task here.

Key Features

• 5 Real-World Classes: Play as a Developer, Nurse, Mechanic, Scientist, or Electrician. Turn everyday professional knowledge into combat synergies.
• Tactical deckbuilding: After every victory, buy one of three cards with scrap — or rest — and build a deck around the class you picked. Your class decides your element — the Electrician chains lightning, the Scientist works in corrosive acid — and fire opens up to any class, but only once you have woken what the bunker has sealed in.
• A deck you can cut: your starting deck holds one copy of each card, and the shop sells removal and upgrades at the same counter as new cards — buying without cutting makes a deck worse.
• Nothing ambushes you: enemy intent is always visible, only you can hit several targets at once, and the select screen tells you up front which classes are forgiving and which are demanding.
• Cores carry over: Every machine you destroy pays out a Core, and reaching the exit pays twenty more. Spend them between runs on reinforced plating, field calibration and a field kit; what you buy stays bought. Losing a run is how you afford the next one.
• Replayable exactly: the end screen hands you the map seed, so the run you want to report can be run again.
• Bunker Exploration: Navigate branching paths through corridors, quarters, an officer’s suite and a supply depot to the fight waiting in the exit room.
• Deep World-Building: Uncover early lore hints about the broader planet, the mysterious creatures, and the Protectors themselves.
• Built in Godot: Clean 2D visuals, smooth turn-based mechanics, and fast-paced tactical gameplay.

Tell us what to finish

One of four free prototypes, going up one a week. They are built to be compared — the one players want more of is the one that gets built out. Play a run, try a second class, and tell us two things: which class felt too strong or too weak, and where your run fell apart.

The comments below are the fastest way to reach us.

• Discord — playtest feedback, and usually someone around
• Newsletter — the next build gets announced there first
• r/ProtectorsOfBalance

More Protectors of Balance prototypes

Three more go up over the next weeks, one at a time. The newsletter and Discord announce each one as it lands.

Four prototypes, one finished game. Whichever one you want more of, tell us in the comments — that is how we decide which it is.

Built with Godot Engine (MIT) · Open Sans (SIL Open Font License 1.1)