Spellheir

Your wizard is forty years old and will not get younger. Spellheir is a deck-building roguelike played against a lifespan. Every hollow you walk into costs a year. Every year is gone. Walking home costs your distance in years, and you must walk home, because nothing you found out there is really yours until you carry it through your own front door. Die out there — to steel, or to your eightieth birthday — and everything on you is lost. The house keeps what earlier generations brought back. Your heir walks out of the same door at forty, richer only by that. THE CLOCK IS THE DIFFICULTY There is no energy meter and no timer. There is an age. A shop is worth a year; a shortcut is worth three; the last gate is thirty leagues out and thirty back, and the thing you wanted is on the far side of it. Every decision in the game is the same decision, asked again with a different number. COMBAT THAT KNOWS HOW OLD YOU ARE Turn-based, hand-of-cards fighting with the twist built into the fiction: your body and your mind run on separate clocks. A wizard in their forties swings a staff. A wizard in their sixties is at the height of their arcana and cannot take a hit. A wizard in their seventies raises things to fight in their place. The same deck plays differently at different ages because the wizard holding it is different. THREE HARD ROADS OUT The clock can be cheated, and every way costs somebody. The Elixir of Life is brewed at the family workbench and every heir who follows you is born two years older for it. A phylactery is a soul in a jar. And in the deepest rings, the Pale Court makes an offer that stops your ageing and poisons your bloodline. A LINEAGE, NOT A RUN The ledger keeps every wizard who ever left the house: their name, their age at the end, and how far from home they got. Failing is not a reset. It is a generation. AN ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT The whole game is one family's grimoire: parchment, iron-gall ink, vermilion drop caps, gold leaf on the rare cards, and marks drawn with a pen rather than borrowed from an icon set. The combat log is written as chronicle lines. No ads. No in-app purchases. No account, no sign-in, no internet connection — the game does not have a server to talk to. Buy it once and it is yours, on a plane, forever.