Knightica free on Epic from 12 November: do not buy it now

Epic has lined up its next weekly giveaway, and for once it is a game people were actually buying last week. Knightica free on Epic runs from 16:00 UTC on 12 November 2026 to 16:00 UTC on 19 November, according to Epic's own promotions feed, which we read this morning. It replaces the current pair, Flotsam and an Idle Champions pack, both of which close at the moment Knightica opens.

One number from our own record first, because it is the part no store page will tell you. Reading it on 9 November 2026, the lowest price we have logged for Knightica since 26 September is $1.08, at Eneba on 16 October. Across the twenty daily readings we hold from that window, the cheapest listing anywhere was a keyshop every single time — not once did an official store undercut them — and eighteen of those twenty sat in a band between $1.26 and $1.33. This is a game whose open-market price has barely twitched in six weeks. Three days from now it costs nothing.

Everything in Knightica is decided before the fighting starts. Once units are placed, you watch. (Official Steam screenshot)

What Knightica free on Epic actually gets you

Knightica is a turn-based roguelike auto-battler, built by the small studio Mad Mango Games and published by Goblinz Publishing. It left early access and launched properly on 21 August 2025, so this is a finished game with a finished progression curve rather than a build someone walked away from.

Our data has it at 75% positive from 1,205 Steam reviews — "Mostly Positive", which is honest rather than glowing. Steam's own store data puts it at Windows only, single-player only, with full controller support, adjustable difficulty, achievements and save-anywhere. It is a lunch-break game you can put down mid-run, not an evening you have to clear the calendar for.

The claim window is the usual seven days and the licence is permanent once you have pressed the button. If you have an Epic account, this takes about fifteen seconds, and there is no sensible argument for putting it off until Wednesday and then forgetting.

The loop: you place units, then you stop touching them

The specific thing Knightica does is make placement the whole game. You recruit units between fights, drop them onto a grid, and rotate them, because each one's talent fires in a direction. A spearman facing the wrong way is a spearman doing nothing. Once the round begins you have no inputs at all — the army resolves itself, and you find out whether the arrangement you built was clever or merely tidy.

Between fights you are collecting souls, buying enchants and deciding which guild to commit to: an undead army that replaces its own losses plays nothing like a magician's line that wants to be protected. Runs are short, failure is quick and legible, and the appeal is the same one Into the Breach has — you lost because of a decision you can name.

The official release-date trailer from Goblinz Publishing, the game's publisher. The rotation mechanic is clearest around the halfway mark.

A round in progress, with no further input available. Rotation decided all of this several seconds earlier. (Official Steam screenshot)

Why the price record argues against buying it this week

Nineteen sellers list Knightica in our data: ten official stores and nine keyshops. That split is the whole story of the last six weeks. Every one of the twenty cheapest-of-the-day readings we logged from 26 September onwards belonged to a keyshop — Driffle held it on seventeen of those days and Eneba on the other three — and the official side of the list never once came down far enough to take the top spot.

Our own read of its behaviour is that Knightica hits its floor regularly and then sits there, which is exactly what those readings show: a flat line a little above a dollar, with the $1.08 on 16 October as the only real dip. That matters because it tells you nothing is coming. There is no sale to wait for and no sale you just missed; the keyshop price is simply what this game costs, and it has been that for a month and a half.

So the arithmetic is unusually simple. Spending anything on it between now and Thursday buys you three days of access and a code you did not need. If you want it on Steam specifically, that is a real reason — see below — but it is the only one. The live figures for every seller are on the Knightica price page if you want to check the state of the list yourself.

Recruitment is where runs are won. The units on offer decide what synergy you are allowed to build. (Official Steam screenshot)

Between fights you pick a route. The choice is usually between a safer reward and the one your build actually needs. (Official Steam screenshot)

The Epic copy and the Steam copy are not the same thing

This is the part giveaway coverage routinely skips. What Epic hands you is an Epic copy. It is not a Steam key, and it never becomes one.

For most games that distinction is cosmetic. Here it costs you a few specific things, because Steam's listing for Knightica includes achievements, cloud saves and Family Sharing, and the Epic version is a separate platform with its own answers to all three. If you keep a Steam library for the completion tracking, or you share games with someone in your household, that is worth knowing before you decide the free copy has settled the question. GOG also sells it, which is the one route that gives you an installer and no launcher at all.

None of that is a reason to skip a free game. It is a reason not to treat "I claimed it on Epic" and "I own it" as identical sentences, which is a mistake we see constantly in the keyshop market too — our guide to buying keys without getting burned covers the same confusion from the other direction, and region-locked keys are the version of it that actually costs people money.

Enchants stack across a run, and a bad early pick is how most attempts quietly end. (Official Steam screenshot)

If the auto-battler itch lands, what to play next

Knightica is a cheap introduction to a genre that gets expensive quickly, and three of its neighbours are worth knowing about. Mechabellum is the same place-and-watch idea scaled up to giant mechs and played against other people, and it is the one most likely to keep you for a hundred hours. Backpack Hero takes the spatial-arrangement part and moves it into an inventory grid, which sounds slight and is not. Slay the Spire is the deckbuilder every one of these games is descended from and still the best-reviewed of the lot in our data.

And if you have not claimed this week's pair yet, Flotsam is a finished survival city-builder and a considerably bigger game than Knightica; it disappears at the same moment Knightica appears. Our running guide to getting free PC games legally lists the other weekly sources worth a bookmark, and if you would rather spend a couple of pounds than wait, the cheap games under $5 list is built from the same price data as this article.

The bottom line

Claim it on 12 November. Knightica is a genuinely finished, decently reviewed strategy roguelike with a real idea at the centre of it, and its price has been flat enough for six weeks that there is no cleverness available to anyone who buys it instead. The only case for paying is wanting it inside a Steam library, and that case is worth about the price of a coffee rather than a decision. Set a reminder for Thursday afternoon, claim it in the fifteen seconds it takes, and spend the money you did not spend on something with a sale worth waiting for.