Northgard Battlegrounds takes the strategy game into a new auto-battling

30 Oct 2026 at 5:59 pm UTC
By Liam Squires-Hand

Available now in Early Access, Northgard Battlegrounds takes the classic strategy game into a completely different direction. Note: this was a personal purchase.

The original Northgard was more of a proper real-time strategy experience, where you build up a settlement and take territory. This strips quite a lot back, to spin it into something rather different. Something to remember going into this, is that it is not Northgard 2, and it's not trying to be that either. This is all about building up across small empty lands to then prepare for various asynchronous battles where you face data stored from other players.

It's all about who has arranged their settlement layout to work the best. Each turn you get a certain amount of gold to spend on various buildings, then after you pick from three cards. These cards are what really swings each game. They're split across three types: Gifts, Blessings and Runes. Gifts are instant like extra gold, Blessings are passives to boost your settlement overall and Runes apply to single structures to boost them. Depending on what cards you pick, you'll gain favour with certain gods, who will eventually offer up better cards for you too.

Northgard Battlegrounds is an odd mixture, and I'm certainly no stranger to auto-battlers, with Mechabellum being one of my favourites. The strategy to the village layout, with various buildings needing to be placed carefully so they give boosts to the correct structures, along with all the decisions you make between upgrading structures or recruiting more people, really make it quite interesting and unusual in the genre.

Messed up? No problem, each round you can move your buildings around to try and get them all working nicely together. And, since it's asynchronous, you don't need to worry about taking too long or not finding players, since it doesn't depend on people being all online together.

There's a lot more to it than just that, with seasons to deal with too. As every 4 rounds you survive, the season will change and bring with it rarer structures and more powerful enemies to vanquish. The whole idea is just to power through and get 10 wins, before 5 losses. Easier said than done, with the tutorial carefully hand-holding you making it seem easy but it's quite challenging.

See the launch trailer below:

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Since it's not finished and in Early Access, no formal review score for it from me yet. I'll be waiting to let it cook in the oven for a good while longer to see where they take it. For now I think it offers up quite a nice, casual and relaxed take on a strategy game.

One thing I would like to see is more improvements to the UI, to make it clearer when the adjacent building bonuses are taking effect.

They've said they expect it to remain in Early Access for around six months. So not particularly long, because they said the core mechanics are all there already. They're going to be using this time for balancing, add in more clans to play and more content overall.

Tested on Linux with Fedora KDE 45 on Proton 11.0-2. It has worked very nicely.

Steam Deck ✅ VerifiedPlatform: ⚛ Proton / Wine (Windows)Release Date: 📅 27th October 2026Devs:Shiro Games, Funday GamesOfficial links:Steam Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com. Tags: Initial Thoughts, Proton, Autobattler, New Release, Steam, Strategy | Apps: Northgard Battlegrounds 3 Likes Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:Pick up more games in the Cozy After Dark Showcase Humble BundleWarhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 is Steam Deck & Steam Machine Verified ahead of releaseGOG and Retrovibe team up for indie game publishingHalf-Life remake Black Mesa has a Beta for a big update with a new UI and controller support All posts need to follow our rules. Please hit the Report Flag icon on any post that breaks the rules or contains illegal / harmful content. Readers can also email us for any issues or concerns.