Games Like Septar

SEPTAR is a roguelite deckbuilder built on Șeptică, a Romanian card game. You play cards into chains and fire them for points; the longer the chain, the bigger the score. Use the wild 7, knock cards out of your opponent's hand, and break the rules with nearly 60 relics.

You play cards into chains and fire them for points. A card extends a chain if it matches the last one by suit or value, and the longer the chain, the more it scores. The catch is your hand: the moment you empty it, the round ends. So every turn you're deciding whether to fire a small chain now or hold your cards for a bigger one, while your opponent races you to the target score.

The two cards that break the rules

The 7 is wild. It plays on anything and counts as any suit (Șeptar means "the seven," which is where the name comes from). The 2 is an attack: put one in a chain you fire and it knocks cards out of your opponent's hand. Two of them knock out four.

Relics

Win a fight and you keep a relic for the rest of the run. There are close to 60, and the interesting ones change how you play instead of just adding points: 7s that don't break a chain, a lone Ace that scores triple if you fire it by itself, a multiplier that grows every time you play a 2. You can also spend coins to permanently upgrade single cards. Most runs end up built around one or two combinations you stumble into.

The run

A run is twelve opponents in a row. Each one adds a rule on top of the last: this one draws an extra card per turn, this one disables 7s, this one bumps the target score. You start with three lives, and between fights there's a shop and the occasional event to spend coins at. The opponents near the top are bosses pulled from Romanian folklore (a strigoi, the forest mother, a storm-caller, a dragon), and each plays differently instead of just hitting harder.

After the first run

There's a daily seed everyone plays the same, six difficulty tiers that open up as you clear them, alternate characters that start a run with the rules already bent, and endless, weekly, gauntlet, and custom modes if you want to keep going.

How it looks and sounds

It's set at a card table in an old mountain tavern: warm light, worn wood, Romanian folk patterns, a quiet folk soundtrack. When a big chain goes off the game makes a show of it, since that payoff is the reason you held the cards in the first place.

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