Rogue Reigns has finally put a date on its dark fantasy adventure. Venn Studios has announced that its party-based roguelike deckbuilder will launch on October 28th, 2026, with PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, iOS, and Android all included. The announcement arrived alongside a new gameplay trailer showing off more of its combat, party management, and rather important problem of deciding which members of your group actually deserve to get stronger.
There’s also a new Steam playtest running from August 27th through September 3rd, so you don’t have to wait until October to find out whether this particular group of antiheroes can survive each other.
Your Party Is Your Build
The big idea behind Rogue Reigns is that you’re not building one character and one deck. Instead, you control a party of heroes with their own cards and roles, then look for ways to make their abilities work together. One character might set something up that another can finish, allowing combos to stretch across the party rather than remaining inside a single deck. That makes deciding who gets stronger considerably more important.
Rewards are limited, so helping one member of the party can mean neglecting somebody else. Those decisions don’t simply change how powerful your build becomes either. Trust, rivalries, and sacrifices are part of the wider game, with your choices helping determine how the story eventually ends.
Basically, putting all your best cards into one character and hoping everyone else doesn’t mind isn’t necessarily going to work.
Something Is Following You
The world itself isn’t particularly cheerful either. Rogue Reigns takes place across six kingdoms where a divine artifact has been misused to abolish death. Unfortunately, removing death hasn’t exactly solved everyone’s problems.
Among the people left behind are rulers who have been twisted by what happened to the world, with their stories revealed through encounters rather than lengthy cutscenes. Venn Studios has previously pointed towards Slay the Spire as an influence on its deckbuilding, while looking to games from FromSoftware for some of its approach to bosses and storytelling.
There’s also something known simply as The Stalker following you across the map. It doesn’t just wait at the end of a run for a boss battle. Instead, the environment begins giving you warning signs that it’s getting closer. Ignore them and getting caught can have much bigger consequences than an ordinary defeat.
The New Trailer Shows How It All Comes Together
The newly released gameplay trailer gives us a much better look at how those ideas actually work, including party management, cross-character synergies, strategic combat, and the procedurally generated environments you’ll be moving through.
It also shows off one of Rogue Reigns’ more unusual visual choices. Characters are hand-drawn and animated, while the world around them is rendered in stylized 3D. The whole thing is running on Venn Studios’ own Wildcard engine, which the developer built specifically for the game.
More than 10 different party compositions are planned for launch, giving you plenty of room to find combinations that either work beautifully together or become one terrible decision away from falling apart.
You Can Try Rogue Reigns Right Now
The October 28th release date is the biggest news, but anyone interested in Rogue Reigns can get their hands on it considerably sooner. The limited Steam playtest is underway now and runs until September 3rd, with access available through the game’s Steam page. Venn Studios also showed the game at Gamescom as part of Brazil’s first Indie Pavilion, giving visitors in Cologne another opportunity to play it before launch.
With party members competing for precious upgrades, synergies stretching across multiple decks, and something permanently stalking you through the world, keeping everyone alive might not even be the biggest problem. Keeping them useful could be considerably harder.