Beginner guide · Steam Demo
Your first run: give both decks a job
Learn the opening loop: explore, fight, choose a reward and prepare for the next encounter.
Demo build 23718635The short answer
Explore to find rewards and prepare your cards, then fight with your combat deck. Start by learning safe room interactions and setting up fatal hits for food or growth; add more elaborate combinations once that loop works.
In this guide
Your first few minutes
- Follow the movement prompt and collect the starting deck. Open both deck views so you can distinguish combat cards from exploration cards.
- In the first room, hover over objects and match their interactions to your hand. Decide where to use your limited energy and available Camp space.
- In the first fight, hover over enemy intentions before attacking. Reserve a fatal hit for Roast when you need food, or for a growth attack when you can safely improve it.
- After combat, read which deck a reward belongs to. Choose the job you are missing rather than another card that duplicates an already reliable job.
- Before moving on, compare recovery or upgrades with the room’s current rest cost. Repeat the loop, changing one weak part of the plan at a time.
Understand which problem each deck solves
Your combat deck handles fights. Your exploration deck handles moving through and interacting with the dungeon, recovering and improving cards. A strong combat reward does not solve a missing exploration action, and an excellent recovery card does not deal with an enemy that must die this turn.
Start with a simple combat job: dependable damage and a way to recover. Stab costs 1 energy and deals 4 base damage. Roast costs 1 and deals 3, but a fatal hit creates Toasty. That difference is why the smaller damage number can still be valuable.
Pick the next reward for the role you lack
- Read the card’s deck and energy cost before its largest number.
- Ask what the card does in your current deck today: damage, food, recovery, draw or a dungeon interaction.
- Check its conditions. A fatal-hit trigger needs the killing blow; a Camp card needs available room space.
- Compare its role with the cards you already carry. Take a payoff when you have a way to trigger it, rather than hoping the missing half appears later.
- Re-read upgraded cards. The number in your hand can grow beyond the database’s base value.
Separate the restrictions on a card
A card may have several of these properties at once. Keeping a card in hand does not remove its energy cost or restore its remaining uses. Check each restriction before planning a repeated sequence.
| Property | What to check |
|---|---|
| Linger | The card stays in hand at the end of the turn. |
| Exhaust | The card can only be played once per combat or exploration segment. |
| Uses | The card has a limited number of plays before it is consumed. |
| Temporary | The card is destroyed when it leaves your hand. |
| Camp | The card needs a room with available space. |
After the run, save one useful lesson
Record whether the run ended in a win, a death or an early exit. Then note the core cards and the turn or room where the plan worked or broke down.
When the deck is incomplete, mark the submission as core cards only. Leave statistics you did not record blank. A short, honest run with a clear lesson is more useful than a complete-looking list built from guesses.