Wanderburg Captains

Captains are the personality chip on your rolling keep. They are not a multiplayer roster and they are not skins. Each one changes a number, a heal rule, a speed rule, or a handling rule. This list only includes captains and captain-like bonuses that demo videos, patch notes, or creator commentary actually name. If someone is missing, the shop in your client is ahead of this page, not the other way around.

Pair this with modules and crew and artifacts. Rankings live on the captain tier list. New-player route lives on getting started.

Norbert the Normal

First-look videos introduce Norbert as the boring archer captain: no special sauce, regular arrow volleys, a clean read of the loop. Play him until you can turn, eat, and flee without blaming the kit. If you skip Norbert and die on a gimmick captain, you learned nothing.

Wanderburg drunk captain build one-shotting bosses

Dieter the Drunk

Randwerk added Dieter to the demo after Next Fest. Creators immediately built melee around him. One public run claims a nasty damage bonus (players repeat a “50%” figure in comments; treat that as a video claim, not a datamined tooltip) and then complains that steering while drunk is the tax. Ram plus Dieter is a highlight machine and a wall-hit machine. If your controls are sloppy, buy someone else first.

The video in the middle of this page is a Dieter-style melee stomp. Watch the handling, not only the one-shots.

Vampire sustain

Multiple English and German videos describe a captain that heals as you consume. HandOfBlood even titled a segment around a vampire build. This is the “I keep licking the map” captain. It is strong when you can eat safely and weak when you are the smallest thing in the shot. Combine with how to grow your castle, not with pride duels.

The Count

A playtest video reads a captain line: heal a small amount of health every so many units consumed. That is a slower vampire. Good for long grassland loops, bad if you never find food. Name may vary with localisation; the rule is the consume-heal loop.

Racer Ruth

Unlock chatter in a longer playtest names Racer Ruth as a captain you can put on the board after buying a pile of artifacts. Speed-themed names in this game are never free. If a captain shortens the fuse of the whole match or cuts nitro, read the downside twice. Fast maps make steamrollers arrive on time.

Gold printers and vehicle-kill stacking

Creators mention captains or captain-like bonuses that generate gold, gain XP or HP when destroying vehicles, or run the match at a nastier pace. Gold printers are the meta pick if your goal is unlocking the rest of the shop rather than a pretty corpse. Vehicle-kill stacking wants you to hunt rolling buildings, which is risk. The double-speed style rule is a meme and a trap for a first night.

Cannon-bonus captains appear in passing (“your cannonballs do more, enemy cannonballs also hurt more”). That is a glass-cannon contract. Take it only if you already kite.

How to choose

Write the bonus in one line. If you cannot, do not buy it. Then ask which best builds page identity it supports: ram-boost, fire circle, sustain, barracks. A drunk ram captain in a mortar kite kit is a wasted portrait.

Spend leftover gold on modules that finish the sentence. Dieter without a ram is just a handling penalty. A vampire without a way to eat is a hungry tourist.

Early Access on 8 September 2026 will almost certainly add more portraits. When it does, we will name them here. Until then, do not trust a twenty-row fan table with no footage behind it.

After you pick someone, run the demo walkthrough route: one learning run, one spending run, one identity run. Captains are not a collection. They are a driving style.