Portentum Was One of My Most Enjoyable Surprises at PAX West

PAX West is always packed with games competing for your attention, but one of the games I walked away genuinely wanting to play more of was Portentum,

…an upcoming cryptid-themed deck-building autobattler from Snowfall Games.

The idea behind Portentum is fairly easy to understand. You build a deck, assemble a warband during your run, and send your creatures into battles that play out automatically. Winning ten rounds completes a run, while five losses ends it.

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What surprised me was how involved I felt even after the fighting started.

Combat revolves heavily around Threat and Life. Life determines how much damage a creature can survive, while Threat helps determine where attacks are directed. That means positioning your creatures and understanding how their Threat values interact becomes an important part of building a warband that can actually survive.

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Then there are the dice.

During combat, dice rolls can trigger different effects from your creatures. Those effects can alter how a battle unfolds, adding an element of unpredictability without making everything feel completely random. You’re still responsible for putting together the warband and finding combinations that work. Once combat begins, though, you get to watch those decisions collide with the dice and see whether your plan actually holds together.

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That combination ended up being a lot more fun than I expected.

I kept winning.

Then I kept winning some more.

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Eventually, I reached the tenth round and managed to complete the run. The person running my demo told me it was the first successful run he had seen that day, which admittedly made finishing it feel a little better.

More importantly, I wanted to keep playing.

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That’s probably the biggest compliment I can give a game during something like PAX. There are hundreds of games around you, you’ve got somewhere else you’re supposed to be shortly, and Portentum still had me thinking about different creatures, combinations and strategies I could try in another run.

There’s also something inherently entertaining about the game’s choice of creatures. Rather than another collection of traditional fantasy warriors, Portentum builds its roster around cryptids and creatures from folklore around the world. That gives the game an identity of its own before you even get into the mechanics.

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My time with Portentum wasn’t enough for a full review, but it was enough to get me interested.

I came away from PAX having completed my ten-round run, earned a little bragging rights for being the first winner my demo host had seen that day, and, more importantly, wanting another run.

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For an autobattler, that’s exactly what I want.

Release is scheduled for Nov 2026

Autobattler Cryptids Deck building indie games pax west PAX West 2026 PC gaming Portentum Snowfall Games Strategy Games