Merge dogs to make bigger dogs in the delightfully silly roguelike deckbuilder Dogpile

I love how delightfully silly Dogpile is as you drop various types of dogs into a vertical yard where they merge into bigger dogs. What a wonderfully cute idea this is.

Dogpile is the first collaboration between the co-developers Studio Folly and Toot Games, the audio design team A Shell in the Pit, and the co-publishing team at WINGS.

A roguelike deck-builder they say (everything is a roguelike now apparently). Play your dogs, get money, customise them with special traits to refine your deck and then play more dogs. There's even a demo you can try right now on the Steam page and it works perfectly with Proton 9 on Linux Desktop. It's all about building up your money and bones, which you can then use to extend and upgrade your pack of dogs, and eventually unleash some insane combinations that might just break the game.

Check out the reveal trailer below:

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What really helps to sell it is all the cute little animations on each individual dog. And, like any good deck-builder, there's various special relics (or dog tags in this case) you can buy to help boost you along the way. You'll need that boost too, with the Balatro flavour of it as you attempt to beat the increasing amount of bones you need for each round.

Physics are involved too since you're dropping them into the yard like a big rock, where some unexpected things can happen. Like the dog tag you can get that flips the entire pit when you have to shuffle your deck, which is quite amusing to watch. You can even make the physics bouncier with the right dog tag added to your collection which makes it even funnier.

It's just amusing that they call where you place your dogs the yard, but it's as if the yard is completely vertical, so they drop into what looks like a pit. A pit of dogs. I'm sure that's totally safe right?

Your dog cards have all sorts of individual special traits too. Some might help you, some might mess with you. Traits like dropping another dog instantly from your hand, or being crated so they cannot combine. Other traits are quite funny like how they might push other dogs away from barking (which is especially hilarious with bouncy upgrades).

The more I played of it to see all of the traits and upgrades available in the demo, the more I fell in love with it and I think you'll love it too.

Right onto my wishlist this went. The demo was but a small slice but a brilliant idea.