I am enjoying 9 Kings
This one took off during the same Next Fest that Skin Deep appeared in earlier this year, then launched in Early Access around a month ago. It's an autobattler with a grid-based unit placement system. You stick cards down and they combo with the units placed in the grid spots near them. Every turn, a new wave of enemies, chosen from a pool of three or four random kings, will attack you. You'll have to build an army that is capable of dealing with whatever kings are in your enemy pool.
There will eventually be nine kings to play with - currently, two are still in development. Each has a different core strategy, a unique set of cards and units, and a slightly different mechanism by which they ramp up power over the course of a "run."
I've unlocked all currently-available kings and got myself up to "King II" difficulty level so far. There's also a tracker for each king which tells you which difficulties you've beaten it on, so I'm currently bringing each King up to "King II" for... completionism reasons, I guess.
I found the experience of unlocking each king and learning how to play them pretty enjoyable! I also found the experience of defeating difficulty levels pretty fun, too - up until Duke/Prince level, where some kings feel much stronger than other kings, and certain mechanics start to feel very weak or underbaked. For example, here's me trying out a (very bad) build at Duke level, where I discovered that the King of Stone's "Trapper" card is practically useless - it places traps in areas of the battle map where enemy units will never actually path to.
Playing as the "King of Blood," in particular, feels very difficult compared to other kings - though I may just not be leaning in hard enough to its "sacrifice" mechanic, which revolves around using one card to destroy other cards and level up their neighbors. This king in particular is very "opinionated" about how you should play it - compared to other kings, most of which allow you to be a bit flexible with your approach.
Every time you choose one king to play, you will frequently have access to that king's cards. You'll also get access to a random selection of three different enemy kings, whose cards you'll have a chance to win each time you battle them. This means that you'll have to find synergies within your own king's deck, as well as synergies in other decks and between decks.
This is a game which is eager to let you break it, and at high skill levels in endless mode, there are some players posting online about truly busted builds that do counterintuitive things, often involving rare, "special" rainbow cards. Like a lot of good roguelikes, this game is very permissive about what high-skill players are allowed to do. Inflating the number of units on a single tile is one of the weirder busted things you can do - if you have the opportunity to do this, I highly recommend trying it out at the expense of the rest of your build. Getting the game to freeze because you have Too Many Guys is pretty entertaining.
On a more mundane level, there are clearly intended/designed combos between kings meant for regular play, which are pretty satisfying to pull off even though they don't break the game! And because the decks for each king are very small - only 9 unique cards per king - there are not really that many combos to find. After a couple waves of enemies and card draws have limited my build's horizon a bit, I sometimes feel like I am chasing only one or two builds that will really work for me, and if I can't get the cards I need, I sometimes feel like I should just die and start over.
The upside of this simplicity, however, is that it's very easy to remember all the possible cards in play at any given time. Each battle gives you three enemy kings to start with, one of which is just a clone of yourself; after several rounds, you are able to choose one of two new kings to add to your enemy pool, which gives you a lot of agency over the cards you'll be able to draw. It's a small, intuitive, easy-to-grasp game, and the decks are so damn small that even I can just instantly recall all the cards I have access to at any given time. So I guess that's the tradeoff - if you make a game small enough that the entire card pool is easy for a numbskull like me to recall, then the game itself will be small enough for a numbskull like me. I am, for now, choosing to enjoy this, haha.
The game is still in early access, so I'm expecting all of this stuff to get better in the future. I've already felt like I hit a "wall" of enjoyment one time - but then I realized that I had completely missed the perks system, lmao, so I went back and applied all my perks to my kings and kept progressing along that progression track, and now I'm having fun again.
Excited to see what happens to this one over the next year!