About This Game

Five ways to play

• Main Mode: 5 heroes, 4 volumes, 20 floors to the Nine Netherworlds; clearing it unlocks 10 Calamity levels.
  
• Tales of the Strange: 5 chapters, 20 fixed stages, your own deck.
  
• Challenge Mode: 10 rounds of "pick 1 of 3," then 10 floors straight.
  
• Daily Arena: one puzzle a day, same for everyone.
  
• Duel (new): a different way to play cards, see below.

New mode · Duel

• Three hidden moves, lower cost goes first: both sides secretly plan three moves at once; once revealed, whoever spent less total cost goes first, and Taunt is struck first.
  
• Blind guesses and ambushes: targeted spells can aim at an empty slot on your opponent's side, betting they will play there this turn — a hit deals double damage, and a miss lies in ambush on that slot, springing on whatever the opponent plays there this turn.
  
• Front holds, back strikes: three front slots and two back slots per side. Front-row minions gain +1 Health every turn and grow ever sturdier, and both sides take damage when they clash; back-row minions gain +1 Attack every turn, hit ever harder, and strike from range without being hit back. Excess damage from a kill pierces through to the hero.
  
• One shared pool: both 40-card decks are drawn at random from the same card pool, so there is no deck gap — only prediction, positioning and trade-offs decide the winner.
  
• Five rivals to unlock: the aggressive Water-Severing Blade, the card-hoarding Thousand-Faced Fox Spirit, the Judge of the Underworld who loves a blind gamble and remembers where you like to play, the steady counter-puncher Withered Monk, and the bluffing Mister Empty Coffin.

Your enemies play cards too

Mountain bandits flood the board with thugs, a Miao gu sorcerer lays out her venomous insects one by one, and the Judge of the Underworld slips curses into your deck. In Jiuyou: Scroll of the Netherworld, every enemy fights with its own deck and its own style. Both sides hold five board slots, summon minions and cast spells; positioning, adjacency and Taunt decide every fight.

Into the Nine Netherworlds

Wolves roam the barren ridges, corpses stir in ancient tombs, and drowned ghosts knock at midnight. Choose one of five heroes — the Martial Artist, Talisman Master, Wandering Ranger, Corpse Herder or Wandering Monk — and travel with a deck and a torn map from the wild mountains down to the realm of the dead. Every run brings new routes, encounters and rewards; when you fall, carry your shards and soul jade into the next attempt.

Core gameplay

• Four volumes, 20 floors: bandit ridges, corpse-haunted frozen pools, a demonic sect's mechanical city and the Nine Netherworlds. Each run's floor plan is generated anew; pick your path through battles, elites, shops, rest sites and encounters, with a boss at the end of every volume and a final boss on floor 20.
  
• Minions and spells: five fixed slots per side and mana that grows each turn (up to 10).
  
• Keywords: Taunt, Charge, Freeze and Silence, plus Lifesteal, Golden Bell (blocks the next hit) and Stealth (untargetable until it strikes, though board-wide effects still land).
  
• 62 enemy decks: wolf packs, poisoners, iron-plated war machines, a corpse-driving ritualist's bell; some ghosts even curse your deck.
  
• Deckbuilding: pick 1 of 3 cards after battles, buy and remove cards at shops, rest or upgrade at camp.

Five heroes

• Martial Artist: the thicker the armor, the harder the blow. Build an armor wall or trade blood for power, then unleash Mountain Splitter.
  
• Talisman Master: stack fire and frost seals and detonate them all at once; freeze and silence to stall the enemy.
  
• Wandering Ranger: let poison eat away at foes, then strike the vital point with chained critical hits.
  
• Corpse Herder: a minion that dies well is a minion well spent. Call back souls as your minions fall, or sacrifice them for cards and mana; Ring the Bell raises a Walking Corpse, and enough fallen allies unleash Ten Thousand Souls.
  
• Wandering Monk: mercy as the blade, a golden body as the shield. Overflowing heals turn into damage, and healed minions grow ever fiercer; Spring's Return mends wounds, and enough healing calls down Boundless Light.

454 collectible cards: about 50 per hero, 189 neutral cards and 25 Legendaries built around five clans — Demon, Spirit, Ghost, Beast and Artifact.

Enemies and bosses

• 62 enemies: 30 regular foes, 21 elites, 9 bosses and 2 final bosses — bandit wolf packs, walking corpses, drowned ghosts, Miao gu sorcerers, demonic-sect guardians, mechanical constructs, fox spirits and dragons.
  
• Choose your boss: see all three bosses of a volume in advance (finals are a choice of two); beat the one more dangerous to your hero for an extra relic pick. Bosses change tactics past half Health, and finals reach a third phase.
  
• 8 battlefield weathers that rewrite the rules of a fight, from Dense Fog to Buddha's Light.
  
• Bounty relics: every elite carries one, guaranteed on a win.

Relics, breakthroughs and enlightenment

• 63 relics: 48 found in a run, plus 3 exclusive relics per hero once unlocked.
  
• 20 potions, free to use in battle, no cost.
  
• 12 breakthrough cards that transform into stronger forms for the rest of the run.
  
• Enlighten and Blessings: a wandering sage can add Taunt, Charge, a draw or a cost cut to a card; shrines sell Blessings that last several fights.
  
• 37 encounters, including four event chains that span a whole run: the Fox Maiden, the White Snake, the Underworld Debt and the False Buddha.
  
• Meta progression: unlock new cards with shards, buy permanent upgrades with soul jade.

After the credits

• 10 Calamity levels: tougher elites, less gold, earlier boss phases, more enemy mana, and two final bosses back to back at Calamity 10; +10% shards per level cleared.
  
• Tales of the Strange: a story mode of 5 chapters and 20 fixed stages, each with its own folk tale; build a 20–30 card deck from your collection and unlock a card back per chapter.
  
• Challenge mode: a fixed 10-card base plus 10 picks to a 20-card deck, locked in at the start, then 10 floors back to back.
  
• Daily Arena: one seed, one hero and the same modifiers for everyone each day; retry for your best score, with Steam global leaderboards for the daily run and the all-time total.
  
• 60 Steam achievements and 6 card backs: easy, medium and hard tiers, plus 7 hidden achievements to uncover.

Built for the desktop

Keyboard and mouse controls built for this platform, with Steam Cloud saves (pick up your run on another PC), Steam achievements and global Daily Arena leaderboards. No internet required to play, no accounts, no purchases and no ads — buy once, keep everything.

Languages

Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and English (switch any time in Settings). The English text is new in v1.1 and written by a non-native speaker; if anything reads oddly, please let us know in the discussions.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

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

Generative AI tools were used extensively in the development of this game: card illustrations, scenes, character portraits, icons, UI and store art were generated with AI image tools, then selected and edited by the developer; card effects and numbers, enemy decks, encounters and story text were drafted with AI, with the developer setting the direction, making the choices and tuning everything through repeated playtesting; the code was written with AI coding assistants; all music and sound effects are licensed assets (Kevin MacLeod, Richard Guo, Eric Matyas, BiteMe Games, Kenney, Sonniss and others; see the in-game credits). All AI-generated content was created during development; nothing is generated at runtime.