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roguelike deckbuilder

The Cooler

A roguelike deckbuilder that fuses tic-tac-toe with three-card poker, in the shape of Balatro. Eight rooms, each one deeper into the building.

About

A cooler is the house's answer to a winning streak: a deck somebody has seen to, or the man they sit down across from you when the night has gone your way for too long. Tic-tac-toe is a solved nine-move game, so the board here works as a damage engine rather than a win condition.

Phaser 3
TypeScript
Vite
Vitest

Read the write-up

Run length: 8 rooms, 32 fights
Boss HP: 2,000 in room one, 11,644 in room eight
Balance: Tuned by a headless simulation harness
Assets: None. Every sprite and sound is made at runtime

How it plays

01
A line is exactly three cells and a deck is 52 cards, so every completed line is scored as a three-card poker hand. Seven, eight and nine of spades is a straight flush; it does 936 damage.
02
Every card pulls two ways at once: where it goes, for blocking and forking, and what it makes, for poker value.
03
Eight rooms of four fights: three regulars and a boss. The same faces keep turning up, deeper in the building, but every room scales them and hands its boss a different rule to break.
04
Clearing a room grants max HP and a full heal, a charm slot every two rooms and a hex slot every three. Every run draws a seed, and the seed shuffles which boss breaks which rule.