Skyforge Raiders

It looks like chess. Every capture is a dogfight.

Skyforge Raiders is a tactics game about steampunk vikings and their flying longships. Move your fleet across an 8×8 board floating in the clouds — and the moment one ship tries to take another's square, the board drops away and both of them fight it out in a real-time arcade duel. Win the duel, keep the square. Sink the enemy Jarlship to win the match.

What's inside

• Board + duel hybrid — turn-based moves, 60-second inertia dogfights for every capture. Damage sticks for the rest of the match.
• Six ship classes — Raider, Skald Runner, Rune Hunter, Ember Orb, Ironclad Huscarl and the Jarlship, each with its own guns, steam and handling.
• Five jarls — pick a fleet leader whose bonus works in every duel: forged hulls, wind in the sails, blood-sabre attacks, shield-maiden defence…
• Elemental arenas — the stripe of the contested square picks the arena: fire, air, rain, runes. Rocks to dodge, lanes to race, power-ups to grab.
• Neural-net duel pilots — the AI on Impossible flies with a policy trained by reinforcement learning.
• Play your way — vs AI, hot-seat on one keyboard, or online through the lobby (open rooms or a private code). Training Arena and a short tutorial included. Keyboard or gamepad (Xbox-style controllers, Switch Pro and Joy-Con).

We're looking for our first rivals

The game is in active development and every match teaches us something. Grab the build, try the AI or a hot-seat match with a friend, and if you have a rival in mind — meet them in Online. Bugs, balance complaints, "the Ember Orb is broken" — all welcome in the comments below.

Controls

Board: mouse or gamepad; RMB, Q / E or the right stick rotate the board.
Duel: W thrust · A / D turn · S brake · Space fire · Shift boost (Ember Orb: detonate, Rune Hunter: rune call).
Hot-seat: the second captain flies on the arrows, Enter and Ctrl. Every key can be rebound in Settings.