A dungeon crawl in one deck
One Deck Dungeon is a roguelike dungeon crawl built from a single deck of cards and a handful of dice. You open doors, roll dice to fill the colored boxes on the cards in front of you, and whatever you fail to cover costs you hearts and time. Beat a card and you can claim it as a skill, fold its icons into your stats, or take the experience lanterns on it. The goal is to push through the deck and reach the boss at the end.
There are six heroes to pick from: Mage, Warrior, Rogue, Archer, Paladin, and Mist, a breach mage from Aeon's End defending Mynerva. Each one plays differently, so the mix you choose changes how a run feels. After a game your heroes move toward unlocking up to 15 new talents, which carry over into later runs.
Playing with a friend
The game is built for one or two players, and it also supports Remote Play Together, so a friend can join your session from their own machine. Two players pick one or two heroes each and work through the same dungeon together, sharing the load of filling boxes and absorbing hits.
Once you know the cards, a run takes about 15 minutes. Learning takes longer, and a bad step into a pit of spikes ends things faster than you would like. That short length makes it easy to fit in a run or two with a group.
What you face
Five dungeons come with the game: Dragon's Cave, Yeti's Cavern, Hydra's Reef, Lich's Tomb, and Minotaur's Maze, each with its own boss and hazards. The cards are full of colored boxes and arrows, so the core of every turn is rolling your dice and deciding where to place them, then paying in hearts and time for the boxes you leave empty.
The game runs on gamepad controllers, with official support for Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch Pro pads, and it switches between gamepad and mouse depending on what you use. Permadeath applies: a run that goes badly is simply over, and you start fresh with the talents you have earned.
Additional content exists as downloadable expansions, including Forest of Shadows, Abyssal Depths, and Relics of the Forge, each adding new heroes, dungeons, and cards, plus individual hero and dungeon cards.