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About This Game

A whole year in twenty-five minutes

Rites of Thaw is an auto battler set in Slavic folklore. Eight armies at one table, one shared pool of creatures: Leshy, Strzyga, Domovoi, Vodyanoy, Kikimora, Rarog. Buy, place and commit, then watch the fight play out. Above the board hangs the Wheel of the Year: six festivals, each visible before it comes, each changing what is worth doing that round.

Every gift has a price

• Three great festivals (the Rite of Spring, Kupala Night and Forefathers' Eve) offer you a gift. You pay with a creature, gold, health, a place on your bench or a vow.
  
• Three small festivals change the rules for everyone: The Rusalki flood the back rows, the Harvest pays gold for the fallen, the Midwinter Feast freezes the shop.
  
• Rites stand on the board. There's a shrine that heals, a bonfire that burns, a green bough that raises the dead. Placed like a creature, and your enemy can break them.

The Thaw: What you give comes back

When the Thaw comes in round 21, every creature you've sacrificed returns to your side as a phantom, with its stars and rank, for every battle until the end.

Every round is a decision

• Night hides your back line. By day, archers see farther. At dusk, fog makes creatures fight down their own lanes. At night, nothing in your back row can be shot while someone stands in front of it, and the hunters pick off whatever you leave uncovered.
  
• You know your next opponent before you set your board, and you see how they stood last time. A shield against their archers, bait for their beast.
  
• Where you stand matters. Every game has its own map with three sacred fields: The Hallow protects, the Barrow raises a fallen creature once more, and the Mire holds an enemy fast.

36 creatures, 6 lands but not a single elf

The Wildwood, the Stronghold, the Steppe, the Marsh, Nawia and the Sky. Every creature counts toward two synergies at once, and each land's chieftain rewrites what its synergy does. A creature that survives five battles becomes a veteran and earns a byname and, after ten, a title. When the game is over, a veteran can take a seat at the Forefathers' Table and come back, on Forefathers' Eve of a later game, to fight at your side.

Other players' ghosts and rivals from the old tales

The seven seats at your table go to the ghosts of other players: their saved games, with the boards they've built. Nobody waits for anyone, and nobody has to be online. Where no ghost is waiting, a rival from the old tales takes the seat: Baba Yaga, Popiel, Twardowski and four others, each with a temper and a favorite land. All of them play by the same rules you do, gifts and night included. While you're away, your ghost fights in other players' games.

At your own pace

No timer in the shop. No queue. Save mid-run and come back later. Every finished game stays: an archive of your armies, a chronicle, a board code you can share. In the Daily Tournament everyone faces the same seven ghosts, with leaderboards for the day and the season, and the festivals are celebrated on their real dates.

A small studio in Poland

Old Spruce Works is a small studio in Poland. Two illustrators paint the creatures and the world of the game, and a third paints the store art. The festivals follow the real Slavic ritual year, and every creature on the board comes from a tradition you can look up.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

No AI-generated artwork, music or sound ships with the game or appears on this page; the creatures and the main interface pieces were drawn by human illustrators, and the rest is licensed stock art or drawn in code. The game and this page are written in Polish. AI tools helped draft parts of the text and translate it into other languages; the English, Simplified Chinese and Japanese texts of this page were proofread by professional translators. Nothing is generated while the game is running.