Out now in early access, Turnbound is a turn-based autobattler about mythical heroes trapped in a haunted boardgame, where the starting player is chosen by flipping a coin bearing a picture of a cat’s anus.

It’s saying a lot for Turnbound’s mellow, fairytale ambience and rich, rosy tile designs that I consider the cat’s anus a positive – a touch of whimsy, rather than just, well, that feeling you get when you’ve been flashbanged by a picture of a cat’s anus. Rare indeed are the videogames that contain a cat’s anus, and rarer still are the videogames in which the cat’s anus isn’t grounds for a refund.

Look, shut up about the cat’s anus already. You’re obsessed with the cat’s anus. There’s so much more to Turnbound than this. To start afresh: the story is that you’ve been trapped in a haunted boardgame. To get out, you must choose a hero – the current choices are Robin Hood, Sun Wukong the Monkey King, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice – and surround them with tiles that perform attacks, confer protection, or synergise with other tiles. Then you autobattle other players and heroes over 10 rounds. The twist is that some/all of these opposing boards are the work of other players, snuck into your game via Ye Olde Asynchronous Online (or manually added using a build code, if you prefer).

Between rounds, there’s a shop screen where you can buy new tiles, level them up, and unlock squares on your board. At fixed points in each run, you’ll get opportunities to upgrade your hero and equip trinkets, which gives the proceedings some additional structure. The Steam page summarises it as Backpack Battles meets Hearthstone Battlegrounds meets the age-old practice of ‘inventory Tetris’. I think that’s a fair breakdown, after half an hour with the early access version.

During battles, tiles attack or activate according to placement and what they’re adjacent to. There are ‘taunt’ tiles to absorb the enemy’s best tricks, accessory tiles that confer status effects, reactive tiles that heal or generate coins when they’re meddled with, and much else besides. Heroes have different capacities. To give a hasty summary, Sun Wukong is good at chain attacks, Alice puts people to sleep while buffing herself through curious and curioser means, and Robin Hood is a counterpuncher.

It’s too early for me to seriously gauge the tactical depth, here, but it feels like this could have legs. In the short term, what elevates Turnbound is the presentation. True, the art is broadly the kind of medium-spice anime-fantasy malarkey you’ve encountered in any number of mobile fantasy games, but it doesn’t want for charisma. Run the cursor over tiles in the shop screen and they tinkle lovingly. Spare tiles pile up in a bag that is subject to real-time physics. And yes, there is the coin with the cat’s anus. Again, the cat’s anus is a plus. I was going to say I’m giving it a thumbs-up, but no, that would be bad.

The full game will offer “more characters, more skins, and hundreds more Items and Abilities”. Developers 1TK aren’t committing to a 1.0 launch date, but are giving a rough timeline of “4-6 months”. Read more on Steam.