About This Game

BloodBuild is a roguelike deckbuilder about building around your loot. Every item belongs to a class - blades, arcane artifacts, heavy armour - and most of them look for their own kind. You place them side by side so they feed each other. One item alone does a little. The right items together do a lot. Your first fight ends in dozens of damage, while a build that came together ends in millions.

SKILLS

Skills are abilities that impose rules on your whole build. Your items act one at a time; a skill acts on all of them at once. You can carry up to five, so choosing which five is part of building the build.

Some skills reward loyalty to a single class — they only pay if every item you placed is a blade, or an arcane artifact. Others hand you power and ask for something back: they multiply your damage, and charge you in health, or in another skill. There are 113 of them, and the ones you find shape the run you end up playing.

CONSUMABLES

Consumables are single-use objects you carry into battle and spend whenever you choose. Your items and your skills last the whole run; a consumable lasts one turn — and choosing which turn is the point of it.

One makes every item roll its maximum power. One fires your entire build a second time. Others buy you an extra turn, five more items in hand, or a rune on something you already own. There are 21 of them, and the hard part is never picking which to use — it's using them at all, instead of saving them for a fight that never comes.

STAGES

Each stage opens as a map with branches. The straight line takes you to the end; the detours take you through extra fights and the rooms where you can fuse and enchant what you already carry. Six stages, and each one brings a modifier of its own — a rule that comes into play the moment you arrive and never comes back off. They stack as you advance, so the build that carried you through the first stage is not a build that survives the last.

Nothing is free. The room that would make your build stronger usually has something standing in front of it, and the health you spend getting there is health you will not have later. So every floor asks the same question again: is the build ready, or is it worth one more risk to make it better?

BOSSES

Every area ends with a boss, and each one arrives carrying a curse of its own. One nullifies every item of a single class. One switches off a different skill each turn. One seals your consumables for the whole fight.

None of them are aimed at your health — they are aimed at the way you have been winning. Eighteen bosses across the game, drawing from twenty-one different curses, so the same fight rarely arrives with the same rule twice. Getting there strong is half of it. The other half is whether the build still stands when one of its rules is taken away.