Dandy Ace

Where most action roguelikes hand the player a weapon loadout and send them down a dungeon, Dandy Ace built its entire combat identity around a card combination system. Mad Mimic’s 2D isometric game, released March 25, 2021, casts the player as Dandy Ace, a magician trapped inside a cursed mirror by a rival illusionist named Lele, and every run is a push through Lele’s procedurally shuffled palace to reach and defeat him.

The central mechanic is card combination rather than simple card selection. Players collect magical cards across different schools — damage, utility, and others — and slot them together in pairs, where one card modifies the behavior of another. The game claims over a thousand possible combinations from this pairing system, each producing distinct effects and encouraging radically different playstyles from run to run. Combat is fast and aimed at constant movement, with bizarre enemy types and boss encounters designed around the builds players have assembled rather than fixed difficulty gates.

Between runs, shards and gold accumulated during play feed into permanent upgrades, and assistants and allies collected along the way extend what Dandy Ace can bring into each attempt. The palace layout is nonlinear, giving players some agency in how they approach each floor rather than funneling them through a fixed sequence of rooms.

The game launched on Steam in March 2021 and received patch updates through April and May of that year addressing balance and bugs. A content update in September 2021 added new magical cards and trinkets, and a separate console launch update brought the game to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 in November 2021. The game received Steam Deck verification as of the anniversary acknowledgment in March 2022. A patch in May 2025 marked continued maintenance, while a September 2025 community update removed a specific achievement. The game was a finalist at Digital Dragon’s Indie Celebration 2021.

Players who enjoy the card-synergy build depth of Slay the Spire but want it expressed through real-time isometric action rather than turn-based decisions will find Dandy Ace occupies that specific gap.