Top-Decking The Perfect Dungeon: Hand Of Fate

If I'm to make my millions in indie development, it will almost certainly be by ripping off one of the many great deck-building games I've played in paper. There'll be no new ideas from me, just stone-cold stealing of others' work. I won't have the smarts to do something new with it, unlike Hand of Fate which takes the concept of combining cards into a deck but then has you adventure through it at random, roguelike-like. Adam posted about the Kickstarter at the end of last year, but I've only just discovered it through the remarkably compulsive Steam queue. It's been in Early Access for a couple of months, and boasts some fresh ideas.

From what I gather, the third-person adventure aspect is used to earn resources to fund the deck-building. It's a smart twist on the roguelike formula, allowing for a degree of randomness while still letting you customise your experience. As you develop favourite rooms and get better at their encounters, that will shape how you want to build your deck. Equally, you still won't know what order these things are going to show up in, or what you might have had access to once you get there. That's before the meta-level of certain cards not being available in certain runs comes into play.

Defiant Development describe the current build as "largely content complete", with just the final stages of the game and some details to work over. They've been providing weekly updates via the Steam forums and patches to the game seem to arrive every month or so. The release target is before the end of the year, so you won't have to wait long if Early Access wards you off.