There’s many different ways to deal with an enemy who’s been making your life miserable. First, the logical thing is to beat them within an inch of their life. Then, as in today’s rogue discovery, just as they’re preparing to meet their maker, you offer them a little gold and a new job. Suddenly, that terrifying monster trying to kill you is your newest employee.
Gold and Graves is a turn-based roguelike deckbuilder from solo developer Yoon that combines tactical battles, creature collecting, and extraction mechanics. Rather than simply killing everything in your path, you’ll bribe enemies into joining your growing army, collect powerful cards and relics, and decide when to escape the dungeon with your valuables.
The catch? Everything you lose down there stays lost, including those expensive new recruits you’ve grown rather attached to.
Apparently, Everyone Has a Price
Recruitment in Gold and Graves involves a little more persuasion than simply throwing money at the first monster you encounter. Before an enemy will consider switching sides, you’ll need to weaken it enough to break its fighting spirit. Once it’s sufficiently battered, you can offer gold in exchange for its loyalty.
It’s a questionable recruitment strategy, but one that opens up some interesting decisions during combat.
An enemy who’s causing serious problems could become a valuable addition to your team if you can survive long enough to recruit it. Killing that same creature might be safer right now, but you’d be throwing away a potential ally. Since gold is also useful for strengthening your overall build, you’ll need to decide whether another mercenary is worth the investment.
Your New Employees Still Need Managing
Once you’ve assembled a team, you’ll be responsible for making sure your mercenaries actually survive their new careers. Battles take place on a tactical battlefield where positioning matters. You can direct individual mercenaries, choose which enemies they attack, and move them into positions that give your forces the best chance of winning.
A powerful army won’t necessarily save you if you’ve placed everyone somewhere spectacularly inconvenient. The card-based systems add another element of strategy, allowing you to combine your deck, relics, and recruited creatures into increasingly effective builds.
Finding combinations that complement your mercenaries is important, particularly as you begin encountering stronger opposition deeper inside the dungeon. You’ll also need to manage your remaining gold carefully. Keeping money in reserve can generate interest, giving you an incentive to resist spending every last coin on your latest recruitment opportunity.
Of course, watching a dangerous monster approach your struggling team might make those savings seem a lot less important.
Getting Out Alive Is the Real Victory
Your objective isn’t necessarily to clear every enemy or reach the deepest possible floor. Instead, you’ll need to decide how far you’re willing to push before escaping with everything you’ve collected. Successfully extracting allows you to bring your surviving mercenaries, cards, and relics back to your village, where those resources can help strengthen your forces for future expeditions.
But anything lost inside the dungeon is gone permanently.
That makes every additional encounter a gamble. Another battle could reward you with a powerful recruit or a valuable relic, but it could also cost you the army you’ve spent several runs building. The longer you remain inside, the higher its danger level climbs, introducing increasingly powerful monsters. Even your chosen route can affect how quickly that danger escalates, making exploration another decision you’ll need to consider carefully.
A Dungeon Crawler Where Greed Can Get Expensive
Gold and Graves was released on September 7, 2025, and is available on Steam for PC, with a free demo available for anyone interested in trying its unusual combination of mechanics.
Its mix of creature recruitment, tactical deckbuilding, and extraction-based progression offers a fun twist on the familiar dungeon-crawling formula. You’re not simply trying to survive each expedition, you’re building an army worth protecting, while constantly being tempted to risk it for something better.
When your most valuable mercenary gets killed because you couldn’t resist exploring one more room, you might finally understand why sensible adventurers know when to leave. Then again, there’s always another monster waiting to be bribed.