Dreadfold

Beat their number, flip their card. Lose the duel, and a card can leave your Collection.

Dreadfold is a single-player dark fantasy card battler built on the core Triple Triad rules from Final Fantasy VIII. Every card has a number on each side: place yours next to a rival card, and if your number on the touching side is higher, that card flips to your colour. You and your rival take turns until all 9 squares of the 3×3 grid are full, and whoever controls more cards wins.

Free demo: play the first 2 regions, Savage Lands and Withered Forest, with 12 rivals including 2 bosses.

Every win earns a card

The card comes from the faction of the region you're in, and the tougher the rival, the better your odds of a rarer one. Regular drops favour cards you don't own yet.

Your first win against a boss guarantees one of its faction's Legendaries.

A loss removes one random card from your Collection, unless you have 15 or fewer. A Legendary picked for loss has a 50% chance to survive.

The first rival in Savage Lands teaches the rules, and losing to that rival never costs a card. A draw leaves your Collection as it was.

Beat 48 rivals across 8 regions

Each region belongs to one faction and has 6 rivals: 2 Easy, 2 Normal, 1 Hard, then a boss you can challenge once you've beaten the other 5. Easy rivals play loosely and Normal rivals go for the biggest immediate capture. Hard rivals and bosses search moves ahead, and bosses bring Rare and Epic cards.

Savage Lands comes first, then Withered Forest, then Fallen Fortress. After that, Sunken Coast and Eternal Crypt open together, then Infernal Pit and Arcane Tower, and The Abyss waits at the end. You can rematch any rival at any time.

Collect 320 creatures

Warriors, Undead, Demons, Beasts, Nature, Arcane, Abyssal and Aquatic: 8 factions of 40 cards, each faction with its own card frame and card back. Every faction has 16 Common, 12 Rare, 8 Epic and 4 Legendary cards, and a coloured gem shows a card's rarity.

Cards you own show their name and a line of lore. The rest appear as locked silhouettes, and a counter tracks how close you are to all 320.

You start with 16 Commons, 2 from each faction. No card is perfect: even a Legendary has at least one side of 6 or lower.

See your captures before you place

Before a duel you see your rival's portrait, name and difficulty, then choose 5 cards from everything you own. You play exactly those 5, with no deck to draw from and nothing shuffled during the duel.

The board highlights the rival cards a placement would flip before you commit, and one placement can flip up to 4 at once. Your rival's cards stay face-down until they land, so any weak side you leave open is a risk.

Dreadfold uses the core rules only, without the Same, Plus, Combo or Elemental rules. Ties don't capture, and captures don't chain.

Also in Dreadfold

• 100 in-game achievements, each with its own icon
• A dark ink-and-gold interface where captured cards flip with a glow and the screen shakes harder the more you capture
• 30 licensed tracks: 20 for exploring and 10 piano pieces that fade in when a duel begins
• 30 fully playable languages, card names and lore included
• Full controller support with Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo button prompts, plus keyboard and mouse
• Fullscreen or windowed play and an interface that scales from 1280×720 to 4K, ultrawide included
• One-time purchase with no microtransactions, loot boxes or pay-to-win

I'm making Dreadfold on my own, as NecoPlanet.

Wishlist Dreadfold and Steam will tell you the day it comes out.