Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms D&D clicker game launches on Steam Early Access

To paraphrase the might berserker Minsc, “Click for the eyes, Boo! Click for the eyes!” That’s right — Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, the Dungeons & Dragons-based clicker game, launched into Early Access on Steam today.

Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms is an “incremental game” where players primarily interact by clicking or tapping for currency that unlocks upgrades to make each click and tap more powerful. These first gained wide popularity with the release of the hit Cookie Clicker in 2013. Codename Entertainment is developing it for Wizard of the Coast, D&D‘s publisher. It’s free-to-play with microtransactions. I’ve played it a bit, and I’m finding it a challenge to keep up with the clicking! So I’ve got to gear up and build a better party of adventurers.

Right now, Idle Champions is in Early Access, which is a development model that enables a studio to release a game on a platform such as Steam while they’re still working on it. This also enables a studio to take feedback from players while selling copies (or in this case, in-app purchases) as it finishes the product.

“We estimate finishing Early Access between three to six months from now based on feedback and player data,” a studio spokesperson said today.

It’s been a big day for Wizards of the Coast in the video game realm. Earlier, it announced Magic: The Gathering — Arena, a new digital card game that promises to bring the full Magic experience to your PCs.

Codename Entertainment takes players to the Forgotten Realms’ Sword Coast, the western realm of D&D’s 5th edition setting. It will revisit older storylines (D&D has published Tyranny of Dragons, Elemental Evil, Rage of Demons, Curse of Strahd, and Storm King’s Thunder thus far) along with offering new tales from the ucpoming Tomb of Annihilation storyline and other campaigns and events. Two of the heroes you can play are also from Force Grey, a streaming series that focuses on a group of adventurers.

Clicker games have been on a steady rise, as GamesBeat chronicled in a November 2015 interview with Codename Entertainment on its biggest hit, Crusaders of the Lost Idols (which will serve as the foundation for Idle Champions, which is a separate game).