Updates & patch notes

AI improvementsSoundFixes

Smarter AI opponents, full sound, and a faster tournament ready-up

This update focuses on making solo play against AI opponents feel like a real match, not a placeholder for one.

AI opponents now actually use their abilities

Bot managers previously discarded every ability they drafted rather than risk a bad target. They now make a real decision for each one, using only information a human manager in the same seat could see — their own drafted squad in full, and rivals' drafted lineups, which are public the moment a card is picked. Extra Bench and Protection are always used since neither has a downside; Captain goes on the bot's own best card; Coach adds a genuinely new position to its best eligible player; Yellow Card and Red Card target the strongest card on a rival's pitch; Sub looks for an actual upgrade at a matching position before swapping; and Freeze — since nobody, human or AI, can see what ability an opponent is holding — picks a rival at random, exactly as blind as the choice really is. An ability is only discarded when no sensible target genuinely exists.

Tournament ready-up no longer makes you wait on the AI

AI opponents in tournament mode were only being marked ready by a 60-second safety timeout, so a human who readied up immediately was left waiting nearly a minute for no reason. Bots now check in within a couple of seconds of the ready screen opening, same as they already do for every other decision in the game.

Full sound coverage and a sound toggle on every screen

Added dedicated sound effects for activating an ability, an invalid action, a turn notification, victory, defeat, a button tap, the card-draft deal, and the final seconds of a turn — on top of the existing card-pick, reveal, and timer sounds. The mute toggle is now reachable from every screen (home, lobby, an active match, tournament, results) instead of only the home screen, and a background-audio timing issue that could leave the menu music audible after muting has been fixed.

New abilitiesNew modeFixes

Protection, Freeze, and AI opponents

This update adds two new ability cards to the draft pool and a new way to play when you don't have a second manager on hand.

Protection

Protection shields the card it's placed on from every hostile ability that round — Yellow Card, Red Card, and Sub all fail against a protected card. Like every ability in Hidden Eleven, activation is hidden until reveal, so an opponent committing an attack has no way to know in advance whether it will land.

Freeze

Freeze targets a rival manager and disables their chosen ability entirely for the round — including Protection itself. The two abilities were designed together around one specific interaction: if manager A attacks manager B with a Red Card, and B has activated Protection, but a third manager freezes B first, the freeze wins and B's Red Card lands as if Protection had never been played. Freeze always resolves before Protection, and Protection always resolves before every other ability — a strict priority order applied consistently across every ability in the game, including Extra Bench, so there's never an edge case where a frozen ability quietly still works.

Play solo against AI opponents

Rooms can now be filled with server-driven bot managers instead of waiting for a second human player, so a full draft-and-match session is available any time, even solo. Bots draft, manage substitutions, and use abilities using the same rules a human manager plays under — no separate, easier rule set.

Fixes in this update

• Fixed the Results screen's winner trophy rendering off-center on wide screens.
• Fixed a header layout overflow on narrower screens during ability activation and bench selection phases.
• Fixed the sealed hidden-pick reveal animation dismissing before a player had a chance to see the revealed card.
• Fixed newly-added abilities not appearing as draftable in already-running deployments until an admin manually resaved the ability list.

New mode

Tournament mode and the leagues guide

Tournament mode adds a full knockout bracket on top of the core draft-and-hide match — win your round to advance, lose and you're out. The bracket, live match tracking, and champion celebration were rebuilt around the game's violet-and-gold visual language this update, replacing the earlier dashboard-style layout with something that reads more like a broadcast graphic: live matches get a pulsing accent treatment, the upcoming final is highlighted rather than shown as a placeholder, and a winner's path through the bracket is visibly traced rather than just swapped in.

This update also added the leagues guide, covering how league and club selection affects the player pool a room drafts from.