Steam release is in works! :tada:

Nice game! Liked the design of card mechanics, and the art is very good. Great soundtrack and SFX as well. Only thing I felt missing was some SFX when colleting cards or clicking in some buttons, but it definitely didn't impact the gameplay. Congrats!

Great game, I feel balatro vibes, at first it was a little unclear how and when exactly the effects on the cards work, but when I realized everything went great, the art and especially the music is very good

This game has captured my attention, i love deckbuilding, and it's well implemented here!

What an impressive jam game!

The deck building is very clean, allows for several different strategies, and makes you want to try again when you fail. I'm very surprised at how you managed to balance this in a jam. The random "sacrifice" ability on draw works extremely well.

Congrats and thanks for the game, I had fun and manage to beat medium difficulty!

Agh! Just lost the last round because misclicked and you can't roll it back! What's a shame

Like it mate, solid entry!

Looks fantastic! I'm not familiar with deck building as a genre, so maybe take it with a grain of salt when I say I wish there was more explanation. It looks really polished and the sound effects are perect

Obviously I have a soft spot for a deck builder and this is very well done! Took a minute to figure out the points = summoning and wish there was a way to move/remove a card once placed, but that's part of the fun. Great work!

Great job! It took me about 3 attempts to beat it but I finally did. Due to wording on the last encounter I almost gave up when I had two spots left, as I thought I had to match the score exactly and no matter how I would try I would end up going over by at least 1 but luckily I played it out :smile:

A deck builder? We know how you feel... Anyway, awesome execution! I really loved trying to figure out the tactic trying to get to satan; unfortunately lost to him, but loved the process nonetheless! Great work on your own, and even actually managing to create a balanced deck, which is incredibly hard in the short amount of time you have for a jam.

Small bug I found: the level tracker in the center doesn't seem to always update at the end of a round, resulting in m e reaching satan with a few missing crosses.

Great game, love it, awesome execution!

I'm especially surprised you got all that card art done in 3 days. I got to 42/43 on the 12th summon AHHH. The first time I played the game, it didn't really click and at first I thought the cards had a mana cost but I understood they were point based later. The more I understood the game, the more I was really interested in the concept. This is a really solid entry, thank you for submitting!

Great game! Managed to beat satan on the first run - it was intuitive and easy enough to understand! A ton of variation in deckbuilding for a jam game too, amazing that you managed to fit all this in such a short time. Great work!

A very cool game that I am terrible at. :laughing: There were moments that confused me, a card worth 2 said "+4 for each even neighbor" so I put two 2 cards next to it, but the total score remained 6. Maybe I am misunderstanding.

I quite like your art, I always appreciate a game that comes across as a grimy grey scale, but isn't *actually* grey. I enjoyed the card illustrations, and the music is vibing. Overall very nice!

@flaterectomy thank you! Rules on the right state that all bonuses are given ONLY on play, so you need those neighbours to be already on field when you place the card with effect "+2 for each neighbour". The same goes for all other cards (most of them at least). Think of it as "battlecry" effect from other card games! We did not have enough time for a proper interactive tutorial for this, unfortunately.

Hope this will help you enjoy this game once more :)

@nozomu57 Aha, now I understand! I got a lot further with that information, but died in the last level before Satan. A clever mechanic that I simply failed to understand from reading the rules.

Really good deckbuilder. I like the idea of earning your chosen card each round and the sacrifice mechanic is a good balance to the draw. Great job!

You are really great! The game turned out great!

Such a great card game! I really like the artstyle that reminds me some board games

You guys are killing it, my friends, the level of completion is seriously impressive.

Great game, but sometimes bonuses don't work or I maybe I don't understand how they work :)

Love the art and music tone. UI works really smoothly too. Was not able to get past level 3, but I will give it another try once I understand neighbor rules. :smile:

Here is my attempt:

https://youtu.be/U-n0Nk_hruI

@icxon @westeaststudio thank you! Maybe this could help:

- neighbours are two slots directly to the left and to the right (so clockwise and counterclockwise)
- bonuses trigger only when you play the card, so if effect is something like "+2 for each neighbour", there should already be those neighbours in place when you play that card. Order matters :)

Hope this helps!

Really interesting mechanics with the card placing and trying to plan your turn based on neighbors. Visuals were also very nice and I liked that you gave the player a decision at the end on which Satan they want to summon based on the strength of their deck.

I really enjoyed it. Played it three times in a row! Good job!
Very good art and music. It's just a pity that it resets to the very beginning when playing.

The card designs are cool, I love neighbour rules :) and the wiggly text was a fun touch.

I would love to be able to take my card back but I understand coding that could be a lot more work for the jam

I got a little mixed up between 'sacrifice' and 'burn.' They seemed to overlap but also not? A bit more clarity there could be awesome.
Overall, great entry! Thank you for making it!

@jvolonte thank you for the review!

Taking card back either breaks the main mechanic with limited space on pentagram (what would stop you from placing and putting back a single card, getting infinite points on play?), or if you mean more like "undo" feature then it would allow user to "look into the future" for all random events. I also did a quick research, and, well, approximately 0 card games allow "undo" because of the same reason :D

Also "sacrifice"="burn"="delete permanently from deck". And I used "burn" only as a precaution in tutorial text, all flavor texts have only "sacrifice" on them :)

Hope these unclarities did not bother you too much during gameplay!

Like it! Well-balanced and fun.
All visual style and music is great too.
Very strong participation, well done)

this was pretty intuitive and I loved it.

it took me like 10 seconds to understand what was going on in here, the "defeat the card to win it" is very clever and fits the theme like a glove.

the art was also awesome and the soundtrack adds a kinda jazzy vibe ... the sounds are so in sync that they feel part of the soundtrack.

one of my favorites so far.

Very balanced for a jam submission. I love games with different available builds and strategies, like here with stacking alchemist pig early on, or playing through insect-manager (+10 for both odd neighbours). For now it is the longest jam game i've played, really gripping.

Can't say about the art very much, but the main thing i like is the cards images - they are simple and fantastic. Almost every image show something from the card's purpose. Fish with chainsaw - make a difference. Wolf juggling spheres - play with fire and burn something randomly. And a bear who seeks a drinking partner... Beautiful work.

Some balance notes:
- chainsaw fish could add +2 (instead of +1) for each difference point?
- ogre for 7 looks dumb (but maybe an interesting option combining with sphinx, but i've never done this)
- thief cat loses in comparison to attacking wolf (since is affected by only even neighbours)

This was very fun :-)

I really liked it although couldn't finish it. It is ADDICTIVE!!!

The gameplay is rather addictive, I am surprised at how balanced it felt. Almost like the prototype for a battle mode of something comercial. The devil imagery is fun and clear and very readable, the gameplay flows in a very responsive way, honestly it is a very smart idea and feels just so well executed, getting to the end was rather challenging and took a couple of retries, and it made me want to go through them! One of the coolest I have seen so far, very much the kind of exciting innovative gameplay that always makes me giddy to play entries in every LD!

This is sick! Big fan of deckbuilders, I built a prototype for a deckbuilding system for the compo, but didn't actually include any deckbuilding elements to make sure I could balance the puzzles for the jam. So I'm super impressed with this submission since this is a fully fledged experience! Kudos

Wow what a great entry, love the card art and visual style and interacting with the cards feels great. The game itself is super unique and a lot of fun, found the difficulty and balancing to be great as well. Overall, really well done!

Really the best game this Jam for me (so far), although I had to play a bit to realize how sacrificing worked

It's so cool, I'm shocked. Excellent job! Satan is still alive, but I will return to finish him off.

Played it a few times just to be sure it's too hard for me to beat :laughing:

Interesting sinister mood in a good way.

It's a well made puzzle. Love the core mechanic!

Well... A deckbuilder, like a deckbuilder. It's just that in such a limited concept as 5 cards connected by lines, it's difficult to come up with any special card conditions, but you're still great. Good luck to you!

Loved this! I'm a huge deckbuilder fan (I made one too) and this was interesting and innovative. The cards were well designed and made me think. Great music too. Nice work!

Brilliant game. I screwed myself so many times by accidentally sacrificing neighbour cards but kept coming back for more. I'm usually not that into card based games. The aesthetics are beautiful.

I love how you can not only choose which cards to add to your deck, but also have tools to get rid of filler cards. I think an option to mulligan at the start of the round could add more depth. Also maybe the round should end immediately as you reached the points requirement. Overall, it's very impressive in both visuals and design, and it's cool how the theme is expressed through the core mechanics (you place cards on a pentagram). Congratz!

This game is really addictive and has a ton of room for further expansion-- I imagine, e.g., what one could do with different neighborhood relations, or even if one could add and change them. Great entry overall!

So good. It was so fun, took some time to pick the rules, tho. Nice jazzy dark moody music and very interesting gameplay. I think I played this entry the most by far.

Saw it played on twitch and immediately tried it myself. I loved it! Excellent gameplay, well balanced, good graphics with some nice card art!
GUI wise I think it would be better with the summoning circle in the center, but that is really a very minor complaint.
Are you planning on expanding on this?

Okay, finally got enough strength to answer everyone... First of all, thank you all for you kind feedback! It was our first time making a deckbuilder, or just any replayable game in general. Super overwhelmed and happy to see words like "addicting", "innovative", "balanced", "great" and others :) Means a lot to us.

@willianfhs @nsadie @nick-blackwood @tpace @allax @tamara188 @unrealkazu @jvolonte @ryzhovalex Thank you a lot for your comments and suggestions! A little spoiler: we are going to polish the game, address the biggest problems (mainly explain rules better), add a little more content, and expand to a small Steam release. Hope you'll be looking forward to it!

Also @doot @turbolaser @st00nsa @srslie @sodaro @sevadusk @bad-fetus @ani @dywanix @kirass @sariiger @rita-pressanykey @velvetlobster @nadia-pixel @ryrumeli @ollie-d @frocto @thormoth @fearawl @rob6566 @smidgens (haha that's a lot of tags), I'm happy that you liked the process, and hopefully you'll also give Steam release a try when it comes out :)

Idk where to follow for updates if you are interested, but maybe best place would be [Twitter](https://twitter.com/NozomuGames), or our [Discord](https://discord.gg/gR9eYKKpsP), or even [itchio](https://nozomu57.itch.io/). Or just check the LD feed once in a while in the next couple of weeks.

I'm doing LD jams for 10 years and it's first deck building entry I've seen, really like it!

So far the most addictive entry for me! great work on making it fun!

Congrats on a great entry! The theme is well used here as you perform the summoning of the creature to have it join your deck and points and effects are applied the moment you summon (play) your card. Clever! The sacrifice mechanic felt harsh at first, but really balances out well once I understand the stakes better.
Will keep an eye out for the Steam release :)

The idea is so cool !

I've passed a very good moment !

[Thanks for submitting your game to stream!](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2124979046?t=02h07m02s)

This game is shockingly well-balanced for being made in such a short amount of time. Excellent work!

This game is really fun! It's a simple concept but executed incredibly well in a very addictive format. Actively allowing players to burn cards off of their deck is such an interesting way to take this, since that's traditionally very difficult to do in deckbuilders, so i really appreciate the unique take you had for this game! Great job! I'd love to see mor of this game in the future!!

Awesome deckbuilder with great visuals & audio.
The deckbuilding mechanics are well implemented (love the way you implemented the trash cards mechanic).
Great job!

Hey hey!
Congratz of finishing the project!
Great quality and overall feel, i had a good time playing this one.
Few feedback things that i can think of:
- I don't know if i lose placed cards or not? But at the beginning i was wondering is it possible to finish the round with less than 5 cards places (to avoid losing them).
- It would be nice to revert last placed card, sometimes i wasnt sure if given effect will activate on card being placed or at the end of the round.
- It would be also nice to pick which card we want to sacriface or you can underline that it will be random : )

Great music and design of the cards, really enjoyed Your submission.
Thanks!

@sparklingsushi thanks for playing! Unfortunately in current setup it’s impossible to take back placed cards, because sometimes some random effects happen like burning a card from hand (so it would be like peeking into the future which is not fair). But there is a feature that you can always preview points that the card will give on placement (including all bonuses).

Biggest problem of our game is definitely lack of explanations, but you know how it goes with gamejams, there is always something you don’t find enough time for 😅

I hope these problems (and other problems from your comment) did not bother you too much though...

Really fun game! It feels really polished, graphics and sound are really great. It's easely one of the best take on the theme for me, because it somehow manages to use the theme both for the deck building part and for the playing cards part. It's all very connected to the summoning aspect, nice job. It's also challenging but fair. One of my favorite submission!

Very nice! Thank you so much for the design decision to do the math for me and show the + green numbers before placing a card.

Why did I have to choose Satan's challenge score 😫 I played with fire and got *BURNED*!!!

What an awesome awesome game, I love this unique card based mechanic! I’m still not sure how the max difficulty is possible, but it’s neat that you get to choose. I’m still unsure about the sacrifice mechanic, early on I thought it was a temporary discard which seemed ok, but losing cards permanently seems mostly negative. But I suppose that also adds a chance for skill to turn that negative into a positive? Anywho great game, the presentation was absolutely on point and very clear! :heart:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2129902300

WOW this gets difficult as the game goes on! I thought I was so smart for a while there and then I was struggling to meet goals and still had like 5 rounds left 😅 This is really clever and I love the deckbuilding/destructing element of it.

Damn, lost at round 12 and struggling a bit to get passed it after a couple tries ! Probably one of the games I played the most during the LD ! You did this on your own ? That's impressive ! The game is really fun and quite well balanced which is often the hardest part. Graphics are not really my style but everything fits well together so and you cann tell there's work behind it so that's still a good grade on graphics for me ! Music is great too. Overall, really solid entry that you god there

@tyrannas thank you!
I didn't have enough time to add credits or register/add other team here, so unfortunately for now team is only credited on itchio: 

I'm not very good with this type of games, but you managed to make fair balance. I'm not feel confident to beat some higher difficulties, but on easy it was very interesting for me.

Nice game, liked the arts very much. Beat the game against easy boss and almost beat against the medium. Wonder how to beat the strongest one now

Really addictive game, feels quite balanced as well for a game made in such short time, and the graphics, music and SFX are great!

Very well done, I will get back to this game!

Super cool concept ! Good luck for the release ! :)

Great idea, this is easy to learn and quite addictive!

Great idea, uses the current trend mechanics (which I love btw) and it's extremely well polished. Great job you all, I had a lot of fun playing it. One of the most solid entries I played here so far. :)

@crocidb thank you! Just out of curiosity: what would you name as "current trend" mechanics and games? My latest deckbuilders I played were Inscryption and Dicey Dungeons, so was interesting to learn after submitting the game that there are some similarities to Balatro, for example.

Might as well do some proper research before full release of this game, so any suggestions for similarities are very appreciated!

Excellent little deckbuilder, awesome work!

Just awesome! Can easily see how it can be turned into a really cool roguelite.

Great little game! Had fun, got it on my second try. :smile: Thanks for submitting!

Great cardgame. I really liked that one. Awesome mood, fitting music and sfx and great artstyle. You really managed to put up a well thought out game!