Winter approaches in the Kharon Valley. The old chief has died after a squandered summer of debauchery and squabbles. your village is not ready for the winter. Your fields go barren and your mines fail, and the call of the Tusk Beasts echoes on the chill breezes from the north.

Kharon's Twilight is a turn-based survival game with deck-building elements. As the new leader of your village, you must try to amass as much wealth before the tusk beasts overrun your village and your people are forced to flee the Kharon Valley. Stave them off for a time, and your people might collect enough to start a new life elsewhere.

The basic actions are as follows:

Plant: plant crops for harvesting. Fertile squares produce more food.

Harvest: collect food from one of your farms. No more than four goods can occupy a space.

Transport: move goods from one square to another. If you have a continuous road, you can move any length along it once you reach it.

Hunt: You can slay a Beast anywhere on the map. Hunting parties require one food.

Trade: Exchange goods for coins, which you can use to buy Power Moves.

Fire: If you have a Zapper tower, you can spend a crystal to fire in all cardinal directions.

The Power Moves allow extra-cool powers. You get a random set of your power moves as options each turn. At the start, you only get one power move per turn, but you can buy extra slots for power moves, which gives you more. Your only power move at the start is Despair, which doesn't cost an action but doesn't do anybody any good. The Power Moves all have different powers, including crystal mining, defense, walls, roads, enhanced trade, power move manipulation, and stimulant drugs. Explore them and enjoy!

The game is programmed in Javascript using the excellent CraftyJS library. All art was drawn by me or created in PowerPoint with help from GIMP. All sounds were made with GoldWave Audio and my mouth.

Balance Note: This was an ambitious project for me for the 48 hours, and as a result, I had very little time for playtesting and balancing. I will probably rebalance it in a post-Compo version. As it is, there are some strategies you can follow that lead to boring long-term stalemate with the Beasts, which is regrettable. The Beasts will eventually win as your resources trickle away, the map spaces go barren, and the number of beasts increases.

Updates 4/3 11:30pm: I fixed three of the informative text messages that were incorrect, which I think is fine within the Compo rules for bug fixes. There is a speed issue in Chrome that probably reflects a resource bug that I'll try to find and fix also when I get a chance (and some sleep).

Update 4/6 (speed problems): I spent some time trying to fix the slowdown issues over the last couple days on a copy of the game, but nothing I tried worked - smaller graphics files, eliminating offscreen sprites, etc., etc. I initially felt like it must be some kind of memory leak or resource inefficiency pile-up, but I can't figure out anything I'm doing that would cause that. The CraftyJS library is usually pretty responsive and stable even with lots of resources in use, but it may be that I just overtax it here, and I'm not sure how to get around that. Sorry for the issues. I'll keep thinking about it. If you want to try the version with lower-res graphics and slightly better resource allocation, it might work a little better, but it still slows down for me. It's here: http://planktongames.com/ld50a