Deckbuilders

Slay the Spire didn't invent the deckbuilder — Dominion has been on tables since 2008 — but it did something more important: it proved a single-player roguelike deckbuilder could be a complete, lasting genre. A decade later, the field is genuinely crowded in the good way. Balatro turned poker into a slot machine for math nerds and won every award in 2024. Inscryption made you afraid of your own deck. Monster Train added vertical lanes. Cobalt Core stacked positioning on top of card draft. Wildfrost, Griftlands, Roguebook, Across the Obelisk — each one finds a different lever to pull on the same core loop.

What unites them is the dopamine of building something that wasn't there at the start of the run. You begin with a mediocre starting deck and twenty minutes later you've assembled a machine that ends fights in two turns. That moment — when the synergies you've been hoping for finally line up and you watch your engine fire — is what the genre is really selling. Everything else is presentation.

Granny's Gambit is our entry in the genre. Victorian setting, stubborn grandma, a deck of tea cards, spectacles, and increasingly dangerous tricks. We built it because we wanted to see what a deckbuilder looked like with manners and menace. The posts below cover the genre broadly — recommendations, breakdowns, comparisons, and the dev work behind our own.