10 years of Roguelike Deckbuilders
Coin Crypt, the world's first roguelike deckbuilder, is 10 years old today!
Coin Crypt, the world’s first roguelike deckbuilder, is 10 years old today!
When I was making it at the time, it seemed a totally off-the-wall combination of ideas and genres, but one I was fascinated by and kept falling deeper and deeper into. A seemingly endless design space where every idea would beget even more ideas. I put everything I could into it, thinking it was up to me to explore the space I’d found. I had no idea that later it would become its own genre, let alone one that nowadays gets labelled as crowded and competitive.
Coin Crypt has always been a lesser-known title and in the grand scheme I really can’t take credit for inspiring anything that came after because I’m pretty sure none of those later works were aware of it, LOL. But I always have been proud of it and I think it is a pretty dang cool game. Of all my works it’s still the one I would most readily want to boot up and play again, 10 years later. It’s definitely needlessly opaque, but it’s also full of fun ideas that still stand apart from genre contemporaries.
To commemorate the anniversary, I was interviewed by a blog called Sunken Shrine, which has been exploring the history of the genre and identified Coin Crypt as the earliest entry. Check it out here!
If you’re curious to check the game out, it’s available on Steam!
But in the spirit of recommending roguelike deckbuilders, I’d really like to shout out more recent exceptional games that have both tightened the design and introduced more storytelling into the mix:
Cobalt Core, which features spaceships on a small tactics grid, just came out this month.
Inscryption is a thrilling and gorgeous adventure with many twists and turns.
Although not a roguelike, Signs of the Sojourner is a brilliant take on deckbuilding & card games with emotionally resonant storytelling.
Happy carding!
(This is part of my “Game Musings” newsletter where I write thoughts about game design and development. If you just want news and updates on my projects, you can edit your subscription here.)