Dungeon Drafters

Each run in Dungeon Drafters drops a player into tile-based dungeons where every action—movement, attack, and ability—is executed by playing cards from a hand drawn from a custom-built deck. Combat plays out on a grid, and positioning matters: cards can split the ground with earthquakes, launch fireballs, or summon allies, and the damage they deal depends on where enemies are standing relative to the player. Between encounters, the dungeon offers loot, rare cards, and lost adventurers to rescue, but the game forces a recurring choice—press deeper into the dungeon and risk losing everything, or retreat to town and bank what you’ve found.

Developed by Manalith Studios, Dungeon Drafters released on April 27, 2023. Six playable characters each have a signature starting deck that shapes early direction without locking a player into a single strategy. Any character can eventually build toward any archetype, which means the deckbuilding system rewards experimentation across runs rather than optimization within a single path. Six distinct dungeons each have their own monster behaviors, giving experienced players reason to target specific areas when hunting particular cards. Serving as the preparation layer between runs, the town hub is where players open card booster packs, unlock new cards, take on NPC quests, and can fish, which functions as a low-stakes diversion between dives.

The card pool runs into the hundreds, and the game is built around combo potential—chains of effects that interact across cards to produce outsized results. Players who prefer action-driven or real-time dungeon crawlers, or who find card-hand management in a grid-combat context fiddly, tend not to stick with it. Permanent progress accumulates in the town and card collection even when runs end in failure.

Post-launch support has been consistent. Within its first six months, Manalith released community items, achievements, and the 1.1.0 update in October 2023. The larger 1.1.1 update arrived in March 2024 around the game’s one-year anniversary, followed by the console release that same month and a wave of hotfix patches through mid-2024. A holiday update, version 1.1.2, landed in December 2024 with additional patches carrying into early 2025. A physical edition was also announced in late 2024. By April 2026 the game had reached its third anniversary, marking over three years of sustained updates from its small development team.