Emberdire

Emberdire is a big game in a tiny package, a light RPG dungeon crawl on a single poker card. The premise is simple: Choose your character and move from room to room, defeating monsters (mobs) and get to the end of the dungeon alive. As a kid I used to draw pages and pages of mazes and dungeons with simple rules for navigating adventuring heroes through them. Emberdire is a slightly more complex take on what 9 year-old me was conjuring up, scaled up but also down at the same time.

All you need to get started is a six-sided die and a few coins to represent the treasures you'll find along the way. You cut the top section of the card, cutting out the character card and the standee; both are double-sided so you can choose which character you want to play.

You set your standee at the start of the dungeon and you're ready to go! Each turn you choose which room you will move to next, and as you do you'll encounter various denizens of the Emberdire and challenge them to mortal combat. You strike your enemy by rolling the die and seeing if the result is equal to or higher than your "to hit" value, the number next to the six-sided die on your character card. If you successfully strike you deal 1 damge to your adversary, if they survive then they get to strike back at you, rolling against their own "to hit" number. This continues until only one is left standing.

Succeed and any loot in the room is yours for the keeping and you move on to the next room of the dungeon. Fail and head back to the beginning to try again, maybe the Fates will shine brighter upon you on your next attempt!

You can use pen and paper to track your health or slide the character card along the red arrow at the top of the game to monitor your hero's well-being.

There are two characters you can try out, one lands their hits at a modest pace with a nice pool of vitality while the other strikes more often but is less durable. You can choose whichever path you like and can progress through the dungeon as quickly or as thoroughly as you like. While this was created for the contest, I do plan on releasing this in a bit more fleshed out form later; the smallest quantity of cards you can put up I believe is 18, so I'd like to offer up a bit more content to make it more worth the purchase price. Regardless, thank you very much for stopping by, I do appreciate it! Feel free to download the PDF demo version and give it a shot, and I wish you the best of luck in your run!

Version 1.1 Update!

Introducing the Shop of the Divine! I thought it might be fun to add a rogue-like element to the game, so you can now call down the shop once per game and spend some of your hard-earned coinage to purchase an ancient artifact or two. You can choose whether or not you want these items to carry over to future playthroughs, or have them be more like a personal goal to acquire and play around with.

Added 2 new characters: Veriss and Th'eed. Veriss is a sorcerer with a lower health pool but nearly un-missable hit score while Th'eed has an incredibly small amount of health but can only be hit on a 6 and heals herself with every 2 coins she acquires. Try them out with the new shop or see if you can best the dungeon without it!

I also added a couple of additional game modes to add more challenge and variety to the game, including a light co-op / versus mode where you can play with (or against!) a friend.