AlcheMice

AlcheMice is a tactical roguelite deckbuilder where every card is a tarot card, and the movement cards carry you across the board like chess pieces.

A run lasts three days and then loops back to the start, but you keep your deck and whatever you put in the chest.

Two kinds of cards, one hand

Action cards attack, defend, heal, and reshape the battlefield. Movement cards carry you across the grid exactly the way their chess piece moves: the queen, bishop, and rook cover four tiles, the king steps one, and the knight leaps clean over the traps in between and onto high ground, where your attack range grows by one tile for each step of height.

Each card has its own energy cost. Action cards are cheap, and a flask can drop a card's cost to nothing, so moving well and hitting hard in the same turn is exactly what you are aiming for. Your position on the board decides which cards you can use.

A deck that evolves

Earn new cards from every encounter and evolve them with alchemical artifacts. Tailor the deck to your playstyle and combine offensive, defensive, tactical and alchemical effects that work together.

Hand-designed dungeons, fresh every run

Multi-level, grid-based dungeons hand-designed around landmarks of 15th-century Gran-Adah, where traps, loot, enemies and obstacles are generated fresh every run.

Use the terrain: take cover and turn the layout against your enemies. Rat guards and tetrapod armours stand against you by day; at night, floating skulls and batpirs come out, enemies you never see by day.

Smash vases, cut down the night-comers and clear a dungeon to earn rewards. Choose your loot: gold, new tarot cards or alchemical resources.

Brew your deck

Buy ingredients across Gran-Adah, learn recipes as you progress, or discover them by experimenting. Grind, mix and cook until you have alchemical flasks.

Infuse them into your cards to change what those cards do for the rest of the run: fire, poison, acid, lightning, or mind control. Every infusion changes how a card works, and the risk it carries, and every infusion is lost when you die.

Three days, then the loop resets

At dawn on the fourth day, the curse rewinds the loop. Your deck stays, and so does everything you stored in the chest; every other recipe, ingredient, and item is lost.

Each loop, you know those three days a little better.

The story

You are Tycoh, a young apprentice alchemist whose family has been devastated by a mysterious fever. You asked the witch Gusparda for help, and what you got was a curse that traps you in the loop. Before each run she reads your tarot, and you choose one benefit and one handicap from those she offers. Buried in the Alhambra lies the notebook of the alchemist Al-Jabeer, and with it the recipe for the Philosopher's Stone, the one thing that can cure your family and the city along with them.