https://krajzeg.itch.io/solitomb

Use your solitaire skills to assemble powerful combos and defeat the dungeon’s monsters. Grab treasure and spend it to build a set of powerful, synergistic abilities to help you. Manage both your own resources and the demon’s patience to hopefully survive the ordeal.

A brutally difficult solitaire game (aren’t they all?) with a strong random element to it. You play as an adventurer who must entertain a demon by slaughtering monsters; fail to be entertaining and the demon will begin feeding on your life force.

The six suits of cards are Swords, Shields, Potions, Gold, and two different kinds of Monster, each at many possible ranks:

• Swords increase your damage value.
• Shields increase your defense value.
• Potions restore lost hit points.
• Monsters are the tricky cards.

You can move cards around in the standard solitaire fashion (though you can ignore suits and stack equal-valued cards). When you’ve formed a hand, drag it down to the vortex at the bottom for evaluation.

When your hand is evaluated, heroic cards (Swords, Shields, and Potions) are evaluated first, adding their ranks to the appropriate value. Then any Monsters in your hand attack; they apply their damage to your Shields and any remaining damage to your hit points. Finally, you match your Swords value to the Monsters in your hand, reducing it in order to damage monsters; a monster whose rank is reduced to 0 or less is destroyed.

When you play Gold cards, your Gold increases based on the number of Gold cards played. Between levels you can add better cards to your deck and spend Gold to purchase special abilities. Special abilities use Power, which is replenished as you play particularly good hands.

On each level, you need to obtain a certain amount of Gems (gained from destroying certain Monsters) and accomplish some other goal (such as having the four middle columns free).

The catch to all of this is that you have to face the Demon Clock. Each time you move or flip a card, the Demon becomes increasingly bored; you can reset it by killing a monster or reduce it by playing hands. When the clock runs out, you begin taking damage — so you want to accomplish your goals in as few moves as possible.

There are four levels, though that will feel like plenty. Later levels introduce Elite Monsters with special powers and sky-high ranks, and you must defeat them to complete floor goals.

I’ve never gotten past floor 2. Can you?

Windows/Mac/Linux, play in browser, or download PICO-8 cartridge.