What if Balatro and Slay the Spire had a child, and that child was a forbidden grimoire?
Grimoire is a darkly stylish roguelike where poker hand patterns power your spells. Instead of playing cards, you're casting rituals — hurling Eyeballs, Bones, Blood Vials, Soul Shards, and cursed relics into an unholy cauldron and watching the score multiply into something catastrophic.
The Ritual System
At the heart of Grimoire is a scoring engine inspired by the best of modern card games. Draw a hand of eight ingredients from your bag and select up to five to perform a ritual. The combination you choose determines your base pattern:
Lone Offering — A single ingredient. Humble. Desperate. Sometimes necessary.
Twin Souls — A matching pair. The resonance amplifies.
Double Omen — Two separate pairs. Dual terror, stacked.
Unholy Trinity — Three of the same. Dark power in threes.
The Dark Sequence — Five ingredients of five consecutive types. Cursed precision.
Coven & Familiar — Three of one, two of another. The coven assembles.
Tetrad of Doom — Four of a kind. Almost too much to hold.
Singularity of Dread — Five identical ingredients. Catastrophic. The altar trembles.
Pentagram Ritual — Five entirely different ingredients, none consecutive. Rare, powerful, and deeply satisfying to pull off.
Void Offering — Five cursed ingredients. The multiplier is enormous. Your sanity is not.
Your ritual generates Dread (raw power) multiplied by your Multiplier — and a cascade of synergy steps plays out in real time as your Tomes and special ingredients stack their effects. That number climbing upward, chain by chain? That's what we're here for.
Tomes — Your Jokers, Your Engine
Between floors you visit The Witch's Market, where you choose one free gift: a Tome, a healing draught, a max HP upgrade, or a new ingredient for your bag.
Tomes are passive power multipliers that transform how your rituals score. There are over 40 to discover.
The best runs aren't about hitting one big number — they're about chaining a half-dozen Tomes into a score that stops making sense.
13 Ingredients, Three Rarities
Your bag holds thirteen types of ritual components — modeled like a full card suit, from common to rare.
Each ingredient has unique synergies with specific Tomes and characters. Fungal Spores bloom into power at three-of-a-kind. Candles chain-multiply exponentially. Cursed Relics are a gamble that certain characters can turn into a weapon. Rare ingredients anchor entire builds — but you'll need the right Tomes to unlock their potential.
10 Playable Characters
Every run begins with a choice of vessel. Ten characters await, each with a distinct passive ability that redefines how the game plays.
Characters unlock through achievements — defeat specific bosses, reach score thresholds, perform Void Offerings, complete full runs. There's always a next unlock to chase.
Campaign Mode — The World Beyond the Dungeon
Inspired by Slay the Spire's map-based progression, Grimoire's campaign spreads a full run across a branching world map. Navigate nodes across 13 layers — each decision shaping the resources and advantages you bring to combat.
Campaigns also accumulate Essence — Blood, Void, and Primal — used to build and expand your Sanctum: a persistent home base that unlocks new run mechanics, crafting slots, and passive bonuses that carry into every future run.
The Sanctum — Your Persistent Power
Between campaigns, spend your Essence to construct rooms that reshape your future runs.
13 Atmospheric Floors
Each run takes you through a sequence of procedurally assigned environments — from the crumbling stone of the Forsaken Crypt to the bone architecture of the Cathedral, the plague-ridden Fortress, the null-space of the Voidspire, and beyond. Every environment pairs a Blessing with a Curse that shapes that floor's combat.
The result is that no two runs ever feel quite alike.
Challenges and Meta Progression
Grimoire tracks dozens of challenges across three tiers — Easy, Medium, and Hard — each rewarding Void Shards, the meta currency used to purchase permanent upgrades that carry into all future runs.
Unlock upgraded versions of your Tomes. Boost the base Dread of specific ingredients permanently. Expand your starting bag. Purchase powerful special ingredients — the Philosopher's Stone, the Demon Heart, the Soul Prism — that appear in your bag from the first ritual of every run.
There is always something to unlock, always a build to try, always a run that ends with "one more."
Inspired By the Best
Grimoire wears its influences proudly:
Inspired by Balatro's brilliant fusion of poker patterns and multiplicative scoring, Grimoire translates that same "chip × multiplier" electricity into a dark fantasy ritual setting. The thrill of watching a synergy chain fire — Tome after Tome triggering in sequence, the final score exploding past what should be possible — is the same feeling, dressed in robes and candlelight.
Inspired by Slay the Spire's map-driven roguelike structure, Grimoire's campaign layer gives every run meaningful strategic weight. Which faction do you fight? Do you detour for a Library Tome or push straight to the next battle? The branching map, the persistent Sanctum economy, and the escalating floor difficulty all channel Spire's DNA into something distinctly its own.
The altar is ready. The ingredients are drawn. What ritual will you perform?
Grimoire — a dark ritual roguelike for those who believe a poker hand is just a spell waiting to happen.
