Over the past few years, deck-building gameplay has become a staple in some enormously popular indie games. You can thank the roguelike genre for this – it thrives on random, repeatable, procedurally generated gameplay. It just so happens that cards are the perfect way to deliver this to players in a way they can understand at a glance. There’s a lot of hype about indie deck-building games, and we aim to show you what it is all about. We’ve covered three of its biggest titles below.
Balatro
Released in 2024, Balatro is one of the deck-building roguelikes that abandons all pretense – the cards don’t visualize magical abilities or random events that befall your characters. Instead, it’s a fast-paced, highly animated, no-stakes game of video poker complete with multipliers and power-ups via joker cards.
You play Balatro by submitting up to five cards to form a poker hand, from eight that appear on-screen. You need to hit an increasing points threshold and beat Boss Blinds, which have special abilities or modifiers that spice up gameplay.
The nostalgic neon glow and vintage felt aesthetics of classic Vegas have found new life in online blackjack, too, where retro-styled graphics capture the timeless appeal of old-school casino floors. While these vintage visuals draw players in, it’s the authentic gameplay that has made it more accessible and popular than ever. Balatro taps into similar motivations, with fewer stakes and a more animated, chaotic art style.
Inscryption
Before Balatro was released, Incryption was the deck-building roguelike. Using a tabletop setting, you need to battle your cards against your opponent’s on a 3×4 (later 3×5) grid. That middle row is the battleground, while your cards lie on the bottom row with the opponent’s cards opposite. Each card has an attack and health value, and a cost to play of four in-game points (energy, blood, bone tokens, and gems).
The game is played in three dynamic acts that drastically change how the game looks, but the card-battling action stays the same. Act one has you navigate tabletop maps filled with battles. The second turns into a top-down RPG with retro pixel art, like the original Pokémon or Legend of Zelda games.
The third act gets meta, battling a robot (and past versions of your gameplay) to stop it from publishing the game to the internet and taking over your character’s computer in-game. Throughout, battles rely on finding, improving, or removing cards to make sure you’re at fighting strength at all times.
Slay the Spire
It certainly wasn’t the first roguelike deck-building game, but 2019’s Slay the Spire was the first to make it big. That was probably due to its intuitive progression system – you’re ascending a spire with new enemies on each floor, and you battle them using moves that are represented as cards.
When you start, you choose one of four characters with a unique health and gold value, plus a special ability and character-specific cards that can appear through the run. That way, each replay with a new character can be different.
Your cards take up the foreground, while the characters are simple but serviceable. The background shows a beautiful cityscape that provides a sense of scale as you start climbing and overcoming the skyscrapers behind you.
Between these three, you have the releases that have contributed to the deck-building revival we’re seeing right now. With Slay the Spire II on the way, this unique fusion genre shows no signs of fading anytime soon.
