About This Game

Draw 7 letters. Each one is printed on a stock, and the stock is the rule. Spell a word. Deal damage, hang a status, or block what is coming down the street.

Killing a demon only frees the coat. Learn its true name, spell the letters that stick, and banish the thing wearing it. Build a deck out of the alphabet and spell death to a city that stopped reading.

I wrapped the fight in art deco and filled the room with foxtrot, jazz, tango, torch songs and every maqam I could get my hands on. Then I called it a day.

Your Deck Is the Alphabet



There are no cards with abilities. There is only you and your letters. Spell words, awaken spells, print your letters on paper stocks, and bring the pain to the demons who made humanity their illiterate, morally bankrupt slaves. (Y'know, the usual.)

A City That Stopped Reading



Humans lost "The Word", and the demons moved in, shut the presses and stayed. Every run is a new day and the same day: the streets of the Ink Quarter are laid out differently each time. Take the risky road or the safe one, I don't judge. But for your own sake, stop at the Printhouse or the Speakeasy on your way to the bosses of the neighborhood.

Learn Its True Name



Killing a demon only frees the body it wore. It walks off and finds another. Every demon hides a true name. Spell words that share its letters, see which ones stick, then whisper it (or shout it, let it all out) to banish the demon back to wherever it came from.

Paper Decides What a Letter Does



Every letter is printed on a stock, and the stock changes what the letter does. Iron letters make block instead of damage. Most stocks are worth the Ink. A few are Devilish, and they ask for more than that... (A wishlist, a purchase, a like, maybe some ink.)

A love letter to every word game and deckbuilder that came before, a manifesto for what is to come, and hopefully a lesson (good or bad, I don't mind) for those who come after.

What you get when you Spell Death:

• Four Lettercasters, each with their own way to spell and to deal damage.
  
• Four Neighborhoods, from the Ink Quarter down to the Placeless.
  
• 130 Lexicon spell effects to find, awaken and carry into a fight.
  
• 23 paper stocks that change how your letters behave, for better or for worse.
  
• 43 events that can help or harm you. (Developer's note: mostly harm.)
  
• Nearly 200,000 legal words.
  
• 20 Descension levels. At the top, the bosses stop arriving alone and stop caring what you spell, and you must banish a few fools on the way up.
  
• My deep gratitude.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Yes, Spell Death was made with AI. On purpose, out loud. Why? This is a game about a city that stopped reading. The demons here don't eat anyone. They need us. They keep the presses running, they copy everything and read nothing, and they are always hungry for more text. Sound familiar? I paid one to help me make this.

Not made with AI:
- The taste, the design, the systems and the balance. 10+ years of making mobile games and 30 years of collecting cards, building decks and theorycrafting.
- The dictionary: a human-made list of about 196,000 words. (Even TRAGI. I still don't get TRAGI.)
- Your words. Nothing is generated while you play. No suggestions, no autocomplete. There never will be.

Made with AI:
- Illustrations: image models, then picked, retouched and composed by hand.
- Music: an AI music tool, directed by my taste for oriental and arabesque music and my obsession with the art deco and noir era.
- Sound effects: most are synthesised from code, just math and stubbornness. A few come from the same AI music tool.
- Code and some text: much of it drafted with an AI assistant, then edited, broken and fixed again by me.


So I'm not standing outside the city pointing at it. I live here. A game about the trap, made from inside the trap. Art or hypocrisy, your call. (I've made mine.)

The line, for me and for the game: a tool is fine, a proxy is not. The machine can draw a street. It doesn't get to do your reading, your thinking or your spelling.

Still hate it? Fair. Spell something mean at it. It's a word game.