For your daily dose of fresh ideas and originality, I’ve got something truly interesting to share with you today. BLOODLETTER feels like someone took a medieval sketchbook full of bad ideas for “medicine” and turned it into a slow, unsettling card game. You’re not a knight or a chosen hero here.
In this original take by developer ALDAMAMI GAMES you’re a barber-surgeon running a small bathhouse at the edge of a village where people are haunted by spirits and old fears.
People arrive shaken from the previous night, marked in body and mind, and you try to keep them together using blades, herbs, prayers, and a deck of cards that never feels quite reliable.
You are not slaying monsters on a battlefield. You are trying to keep ten fragile villagers alive long enough to break the grip of whatever is feeding on them.
The whole game runs on a turn-based day–evening–night cycle. During the day, you treat villagers, using cards to push and pull on their four core stats and repair the damage done by last night’s attack.
In the evening, you lean on their help instead: each villager brings their own deck-building tricks, letting you upgrade or duplicate key cards, manipulate the order of the next day’s events, or tweak your draw in ways that matter over the long run.
When night falls, the entity gets its turn. Its influence spreads through the village, corrupting stats and undermining the work you just did, forcing you to think a few cycles ahead rather than just reacting to the current board.
BLOODLETTER is a full-on deck builder with lots of cards to play with, each with its own effect and illustration, plus six powerful blessing and curse cards that can swing a run in your favor or ruin it if handled badly.
The ten villagers come with bizarre animations and distinct abilities that shape how you build and tune your deck. On top of that sit four different entities, each with its own win condition, so you are not just trying to “survive longer” but to meet very specific strategic goals depending on the foe you choose.
Wrapped in a style inspired by tarot, medieval manuscripts, old healing practices and the superstitions around them, BLOODLETTER isn’t about clean heroism. It’s about working with dubious tools in a world that barely understands what health even is, and finding a way to turn that uncertainty into a system you can control.
Set for a 2026 release on PC via Steam, BLOODLETTER leans into that mix of dark fantasy and medieval “science” without winking at you.
It’s slow, tense, and a bit claustrophobic, more about listening, observing, and choosing the least terrible option than chasing big flashy plays. If you like deck-builders that focus on mood and small, meaningful decisions, this one looks like the sort of game you sit with. There’s also a demo available. Below is the reveal trailer.
