Pay off your debts to a greedy landlord in the seriously charming deckbuilder Cropdeck

Farming roguelike deckbuilder Cropdeck has you use cards to grow crops and collect weird-looking scarecrows that help you farm and create satisfying combos. Disclosure: the developer provided a key for GamingOnLinux.

It's a thoroughly charming experience that blends together a progression system a little like Slay the Spire with you picking different nodes on a map, with tile-based puzzles where you need to grow the best crops you can across challenging environments to build up enough coin to keep paying off your greedy landlord.

Your cards in your deck make up your tools (like a water bucket, or a hoe) and crops. So on each map you go through a loop of tilling the land, planting crops, watering and repeat. In between, you get to pick a few new cards to keep progressing in the level. Additionally, there's a special scarecrow system, which are inspired directly by Balatro jokers that can help you with some fun combinations.

The key is the crop placement, it's all about placing everything strategically to make the most out of the level and your scarecrows that help with their effects to maximise your income each time you pull up a crop. It gets progressively more difficult, as you need to keep pulling more crops as you go through to satisfy your landord's demands.

There's a weather system you need to keep an eye on too. Along the top of the screen you get a readout of what the weather will be like for the next few days, allowing you to potentially plan ahead a bit. Like if it's raining, you can save on your buckets. Or, you might end up with some bad weather and lightning might set your crops alight.

When you complete a level you gain gems, which can then be used at certain nodes on the map to enter a shop. Here you can buy up new scarecrows, individual cards or new packs of cards that might have something a little special in them. So there's lots of ways to tweak your run as you go through. That's part of where the roguelike natures of it comes in, as it's all different each time.

A great game to pick up and play with runs that don't overstay their welcome. A successful full run can take 30-60 minutes, divided across three different seasons to keep things fresh and give you different challenges.

I an email to GamingOnLinux the developer noted that this is their first solo project, and their first PC game. With everything done almost entirely alone (with some help from their fiancée). An impressive release for a first-timer, as I had a lot of chilled-out fun with it.

See the release trailer below:

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Straightforward mechanics that keep you engaged long enough to finish it, but it could have done with just a bit more content to make many runs more interesting. But overall a thoroughly sweet deckbuilding gem that's worth grabbing and the Linux version worked perfectly.

It's priced at £9.99 / $12.99 / €11.99 / 34,99 zł / R$ 34,99 / ¥ 45.00 with a 15% discount that ends May 12th.