Planned Release Date: 2026

About This Game

The Encroaching is a digital board game for 1 to 4 players. The city reveals itself one tile at a time, and the streets don't always settle into a shape that feels right. Hidden roles and secret objectives keep everyone's intentions blurred, and the pale creeping through the streets punishes anyone who trusts too easily.

HIDDEN ROLES

Before the first round, each player is secretly a Survivor or an Antagonist. Everyone moves through the same city, uses the same items and follows the same rules, so the only way to tell who's on your side is to watch how they play. At a table of people there may be no Antagonist at all, one, or two, and nobody is told how many. Survivors work to stop the cult and escape. Antagonists work to make sure they don't. Quietly, if they're smart.

TURN STRUCTURE

Each round opens with an initiative draft: players choose cards to set the turn order. On your turn you place a new tile, changing the city for everyone, then spend your actions to move, search for items, use the places you stand in, or deal with whatever the board has become.

THREE SCENARIOS

The Encroaching: find a Copy of the Play, carry it to a Ritual Site and perform it to stop the ritual there. Stop enough rituals and the way out opens. The cult has other plans, and someone at the table may share them.
The Hunt: everyone against the Herald, a thing that can't be hurt. Build the city into a cage around it and seal it in, or survive long enough to escape.
The Conspiracy: no sides. Everyone has a secret target and a secret hunter. Score the most before the city falls, because if it falls, everyone loses.

SECRET OBJECTIVES

Every player also takes secret objectives that score on their own, whoever wins: heal another player, use three different kinds of place, finish off two cultists within two rounds, end rounds beside a cultist without ever attacking. They reward different ways of playing and give every game its own small stories.

THE PALE

Each round a pallid corruption spreads along the roads, turning places into misremembered versions of themselves, stronger and more costly. Most cultists rise from it. When the way out opens, Carcosa rises and the Final Act counts down; when the curtain falls, anyone still inside is lost. And build the city into a corner, and the Pallid Prince comes to walk what’s left of it.

STEAM WORKSHOP

Bring your own figures. Upload a model for the players or the cultists, or play with ones the community has made.

ITEMS AND COMBAT

Search the city for weapons, healing, tools and rarer pale things. Combat is a light dice system, and items give passive bonuses, actions of their own or one-time tricks. Your bag is small, and what you carry may decide who gets out.

MULTIPLAYER

Play alone with AI players, or online with up to four. The host picks the scenario and the seats, and AI players fill any empty ones.