Antihero

Most digital board games have a tell. Somewhere around minute forty, you can feel the cardboard underneath — the turn order that only existed to keep four people at a table busy, the upkeep phase that a computer should have automated away, the sprawl that a publisher added because a bigger box justifies a bigger price. Antihero has no tell. Tim Conkling didn’t adapt a tabletop game; he designed one that could only ever exist on a screen, and then he cut it until nothing was left but the decisions.

The pitch is Dickens by way of a knife fight. You’re a master thief in a gas-lit Victorian city, building a guild out of street urchins, thugs, gangs, saboteurs and assassins, racing a rival to a victory-point threshold across a compact tile map. Urchins infiltrate businesses and estates to generate income. Gold and stolen lanterns feed a branching upgrade tree. Victory points come from contracts, from blackmailing church and government buildings, from holding key locations — and, when the math demands it, from putting a blade in a rival’s unit in an alley where nobody’s watching.

Released on July 10, 2017 and published by Versus Evil, it landed well with critics — an 81 on Metacritic — and the iOS version holds a 4.6 out of 5 from 262 ratings. Those are small numbers, and that’s the whole story of this game’s commercial life: well-made, admired, under-bought. Versus Evil shut down in December 2023. The Google Play listing now returns a 404 and the Android build appears delisted. There was never a Switch version — the “Anti Hero Bundle” on the eShop is three unrelated games, and enough people have made that mistake to be worth stating plainly. What’s left is Steam and iOS, running on maintenance-mode momentum. The game is still very good. Nobody is coming to make it better.

• The 20–30 minute match: A complete strategic arc — opening, economy build, upgrade pivot, endgame knife-fight — inside a single sitting. This is the product, and everything else serves it.
• Fog-of-war denial economy: You don’t just build your engine; you strangle theirs. Infiltrating a building your opponent wanted, assassinating the urchin funding their next tier, blocking the church they needed for points — denial is a first-class win condition, not a spoiler tactic.
• Branching upgrade tree: Gold and lanterns buy unlocks. The tree is wide enough that two players can build genuinely different guilds from the same map, and tight enough that you’ll never afford everything. Commitment is the mechanic.
• Asynchronous multiplayer: Take a turn, close the app, get pinged tomorrow. On mobile this is the standout feature and the reason a years-old strategy game still has a pulse.
• House Rules: Custom starting gold, map size, and win conditions. A modest set of dials, but they meaningfully change the tempo of a friend-group series.

The Gameplay Loop

The loop is three verbs deep and bottomless. Move your thief. Spend your gold. Deny your opponent. That’s it — and the reason it works is that all three verbs are competing for the same scarce resource, which is turns.

Your thief is your only real explorer, your only burglar, and the unit that unlocks everything. Every turn she spends walking somewhere is a turn she isn’t burgling. Every lantern she steals is a lantern you could spend now on a cheap unit or hoard toward a tier that pays off in six turns you may not get. Antihero never asks you whether you want a thing. It asks what you’re willing to be behind on to have it.

The urchin economy is the sharpest piece of design here. Infiltrating a business is cheap, slow-yielding, and permanent-ish — a bet that the game runs long. The buildings are contested, so an infiltration is simultaneously income for you and income denied to them, which means the same action reads differently depending on whether you’re ahead. A tempo play and an economy play are frequently the same click, and knowing which one you’re actually making is the skill ceiling. New players see a board of buildings and grab the nearest. Good players grab the one their opponent’s thief was three tiles from.

Then the violence. Thugs, gangs, saboteurs, assassins — each is a scalpel, not a hammer. This is not a game of stacks and doomstacks; a single assassin removing a single urchin can swing a match, because that urchin was two gold a turn and two gold a turn was the difference between reaching the next tier before the point threshold hit. Combat here is arithmetic with a mask on. It’s also, satisfyingly, reversible in cost but not in time. You can rebuy the urchin. You cannot rebuy the four turns it was working.

Where the Tension Comes From

Fog of war does enormous lifting. You know roughly what your opponent is doing — the board tells you — but not when. Every match settles into a bluffing rhythm where you’re reading spend patterns rather than positions. Did they just buy an assassin, or did they bank it? Are they racing the point total or setting up a blackmail chain? The information gap is small enough to reason about and large enough to be wrong about. That’s the correct amount.

The win condition deserves credit too. Points arrive from too many directions to defend all of them, which prevents the turtling death-spiral that ruins so many two-player strategy games. You cannot sit on a lead. You can only outrun it.

Onboarding and Friction

The campaign teaches well and ends early. It’s story-driven, charming, competently written, and over roughly when you’ve stopped needing it — which is either elegant restraint or thin content depending on how much you paid attention to the “story-driven” part of the marketing. Treat the campaign as an extended tutorial and you’ll be delighted; treat it as the main course and you’ll feel short-changed. Steam reviewers land on that criticism constantly, and they’re right.

Skirmish AI covers several difficulty tiers and is a capable sparring partner at the top end, but it plays the board rather than the opponent. It won’t bluff you. Its priorities are readable enough that after a couple dozen matches it becomes practice, not competition. The real game is PvP.

Which is where the structural problem lives. The online population is small, and ranked matchmaking can take a while — fatal for a game whose entire value proposition is twenty-five minutes to spare. Async play is the workaround and it’s a good one, but it depends on having friends who own this game. The single best strategy for owning Antihero is buying a copy for someone else.

Conkling’s art direction is the reason people remember this game years after they stop playing it. Ink-line Victorian, heavy shadow, warm lantern pools cut out of cold blue-black streets — it’s illustration, not rendering, and it ages the way illustration does, which is to say not at all. The mood is doing real mechanical work, too: the darkness is the fog of war. You feel the information gap rather than reading it off a UI element.

The interface is disciplined. Resource counts, unit costs, and the upgrade tree are legible at a glance, and the tree in particular is one of the better-organized progression screens in the genre — you can see the shape of your whole plan without scrolling. Turn feedback is built for repetition, with no animation tax on repeated actions, which matters enormously in a game meant to be replayed dozens of times.

Performance is a non-issue by design. This is a 2D tile game with modest demands, light on hardware by nature. The technical risk here isn’t framerate — it’s backend. Whatever infrastructure serves online matchmaking is now maintained by a publisher that no longer exists, and that’s a real question mark. Nobody has promised you tomorrow.

Steam is the version to buy if you’re picking one. Mouse precision suits a dense tile map with contested adjacency, the larger screen makes the upgrade tree readable without squinting, and hover states surface information that touch has to bury behind a tap. It’s also where the bigger — though still modest — player pool lives, which matters for ranked.

iOS is not a port; it’s arguably the better fit for the design. A 25-minute match is a commute. The board was built compact and hex-free, so it survives the shrink to a phone better than almost any strategy game of this type, and tapping a tile is a more natural verb than clicking one. Async multiplayer is the feature that justifies the mobile version entirely — a turn takes thirty seconds, and the notification-driven rhythm turns a strategy game into something you play across a week without ever sitting down to play it. On an iPhone the upgrade tree gets cramped and the touch targets on adjacent units invite the occasional misfire; on an iPad it’s comfortable.

The absent platforms are part of the calculus. Android is delisted. There is no Switch version and there won’t be one.

Antihero is a small, sharp thing, and it’s a little sad that the industry couldn’t figure out what to do with it. The design is a lesson in subtraction — every system earns its place, every turn presents a real choice, and the whole apparatus resolves in less time than an episode of television. Conkling built something a much larger studio would have padded into mediocrity.

What you’re buying now is a finished object rather than a service. The campaign won’t grow. The AI won’t get smarter. Nobody is balancing the upgrade tree next patch, and the matchmaking pool is what it is. For a game whose entire pitch is complete experience, twenty-five minutes, that’s a smaller flaw than it would be almost anywhere else — Antihero was always meant to be played out rather than kept up with.

Bring a friend. Play the campaign in an evening, then spend a year knifing each other in alleys, one turn a day. On that basis it’s a solid deal in strategy gaming — recommended, with the caveats above.