Graveyard Shift: A Sage's Last Stand

The Veil tore on a Monday. The dead stopped staying dead. And Aldric — Sage of the Veil, hiding from his past in a quiet mortician's job — is the only one still on shift.

GRAVEYARD SHIFT: A SAGE'S LAST STAND is a dark pixel-art roguelike deckbuilder where the dead on your table become the deck in your hands. Survive twenty-two nights across four weeks of escalating horrors, forge your cards toward their final Ascended forms, and find out what's been waiting behind the Veil the whole time.

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⚰ EVERY CORPSE IS A CHOICE

Every body on your table is a build decision.

• BURIAL — bury up to two cards, gone forever. Travel light.

• EMBALM — name a family. Five of its cards come out of the drawer; keep one, preserved at rank 1, and the body heals you on the way out.

• DISSECTION — take it apart: four Veil cards and one Mystery.

• FULL RELEASE — sever the soul and rip open a booster of possibilities: five cards, keep two, and a Friend or a Legendary may answer… but the Veil remembers every door you open.

Some corpses arrive possessed — confront what's inside and win, and a Legendary soul may fight beside you for the rest of the run. Lose, and it joins tonight's wave. And some souls give more than a card:

• A rare GENEROUS SOUL spills ten cards across the table and lets you keep four.

• A rarer GAMBLER'S SOUL deals ten face-down and dares you to flip three — and live with whatever you find.

And whatever the night hands you, the deck stays yours — any card you never asked for can be turned away at the gravedigger's price. It climbs with every refusal, so travel light while it's cheap.

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✦ SIX FAMILIES OF POWER

158 handcrafted cards. 67 named combos. One deck, built from the dead.

• VENGEANCE — brutal, direct, and always swinging.

• CHAOS — dice, gambits, and beautiful disasters.

• WISDOM — patient engines that outlast the night.

• PLAGUE — rot that does the killing for you.

• VEIL — forbidden power at a forbidden price.

• MYSTERY — true effects hidden until you dare to play them.

Chain the right cards and one of 67 named combos detonates across the screen — with a score multiplier that rewards style as much as survival.

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🏆 THE FINEST SHIFTS

Three boards hang on the title, and every name on them is a door.

• THE CLEAN MONTH — the all-time board. Your best campaign, posted as it stands.

• THE WEEKLY — this week's contract, every player on the same terms and the same seed. A new board every Monday.

• THE ASH PAGE — the same runs with debts signed, multiplier and all. Sealed until you've found the Ledger.

Click any name and read their shift — the deck they carried, card by card, the cards they cast most, the fight, the purse and the clock, and the Morgue upgrades, talents or terms they stood on.

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📜 THE WEEKLY SHIFT

One contract a week. The same for everyone.

Every Monday a contract is posted: one debt carried all month, two boons lent by the house, one seed — the same terms for every player in the world. It's the full month, all twenty-two nights, on the house profile: no Morgue, no talents, no Ledger but these, every card in the pool. Play it as often as you like this week — your best score is the one that posts, and each run must finish before Monday's bell. An unfinished one lapses and posts nothing. Your campaign records are untouched.

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☠ LET IT ROT

Not every deck kills quickly. The best ones don't have to.

Stack Poison, Bleed and Burn on a body and it dies on its own time — then Virulence swells everything already eating the creature, and Volatile Fuel pours on what's still burning. Afflictions wear a mark on the enemy so you can always read what's killing it, and the biggest horrors in the game are the ones that give a slow build the most turns to work.

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⚔ THE DEAD FIGHT IN PACKS

Under the Blood Moon, targeting becomes the whole game.

A front-liner walks in shielded by a support line — healers stitching it back together, casters seeding poison into your hand's future. Cut the healer first, sweep the entire line with one blade, or burn the front-liner down before the mending outruns you. Cards that hit everything stop being a luxury and start being a plan.

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🌘 THE VEIL KEEPS A LEDGER

Power is never free. It isn't even cheap.

The Veil is the deep end of the pool — the widest school in the game, home to most of the Legendary companions, and the one that deals in draw, damage and control all at once. The fastest way in is Full Release: sever a soul, open its pack. But the Veil remembers every door you open — release too many souls in a row and the debt comes due mid-run, when the next thing through the tear arrives twice as strong.

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⚒ FORGE EVERY CARD TO ITS FINAL FORM

Cards aren't static — they're a ladder.

Every card climbs a six-star rank track of real, hand-authored upgrades that rewrite its numbers, its cost, and eventually its whole effect — and you can read the whole climb before you commit: right-click any card, anywhere it's offered, and it flips over in place — every rank it can reach printed on its back like a real card.

Push a Legendary companion to the top and it goes ASCENDED — a silver-electric form with an evolved signature ability:

• Skyrend's pillars fall from the sky — unmissable, unblockable.

• Grimm's every strike carries the rot his prey is already dying of.

• The Wound Remembers sends a dying body's bleeding crawling into whatever rises next — landing as a blow of its own.

• Find the rest.

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👑 TWENTY-TWO NIGHTS. EIGHT BOSSES. ONE SECRET.

Each week ends at a boss that rewrites the rules.

• THE CORONER mirrors your strikes — and, enraged, starts stealing the cards out of your deck.

• THE QUARRY KING mortars himself in fresh stone every turn, until his blows crush straight through Block.

• THE VEIL TYRANT cannot die at all — until he unfolds, wings blotting the candlelight, and his breath turns to fire.

Then the fourth week opens — and it is not the dead who came. The month ends under the Blood Moon or before the Wild Hunt, each with its own creatures, its own gate and its own master, and past them the one thing that was never meant to have a name.

Over a hundred kinds of dead stand between you and the dawn, and the nights themselves turn against you: omens that reshape the rules after dark, elite waves, and things that were never meant to have names. Survive the whole month, and the Veil finally shows you what it has been hiding.

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🌳 THE MASTERS' TREE

Beyond the Wardens wait the Masters — and permanent power.

Felling a Master earns a Mark. Marks buy medallions on a permanent talent tree: three paths of claimed-forever power, from thicker skin to the Midnight Forge, each path crowned by a capstone that changes how every future run begins. Claim the Founder's Reliquary and a Legendary of your choosing rides in your starting deck. Forever.

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📖 SIGN YOUR OWN CURSES

Deep enough down the tree, a hidden book opens.

THE LEDGER — its gold page sells permanent boons for everything you've ever banked. Its ash page is stranger: debts you sign against yourself.

• Fight blind, with no enemy intents.

• Let nothing heal you, all run.

• Let your draw pile never refill — everything you play tonight is ash.

Every signed debt multiplies your score and your payout — stack the whole page and the game becomes a ×35 nightmare of your own design. The Ash Page of the leaderboard remembers who signed what.

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🕯 BETWEEN THE NIGHTS

• Upgrade the morgue itself — four tiers of permanent tools that carry across every run, the last of them sealed until you've cleared the third week.

• Fill the Collection — every card, all 67 combos, 18 lore notes, 30 trophies, and your highest-scoring shifts.

• Mouse, controller, or Steam Deck — full Steam Input support swaps every on-screen prompt to your gamepad's own buttons the moment you pick it up.

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The dead are patient. Your shift starts at dusk.