Games Like Good Dirt

You are a botanist. You are not a pilot.

Your UFO is in a field on Earth, and it is not going anywhere without fuel. Fortunately,

this planet grows things — badly, slowly, in the wrong colors, but it grows things. Splice

what you find into something that grows fast enough to get you home.

Good Dirt is a hex-grid roguelike deckbuilder. Your deck is crops. Your board is a

field. Every run is a journey outward from the crash site, and how far you get is the score.

Plant a board, not a card

Each field is a handful of hex tiles and a harvest goal. Draw crops, spend water, and place

them — then watch how they read each other. Neighbors feed neighbors. Families stack. The

same three cards score completely differently depending on where they land.

There is no waiting for things to grow. You assemble the board, the board resolves, you take

what it made. The puzzle is the planning, not the patience.

Fuel is the whole story

Fuel does two jobs, and they fight each other:

There's no shop to top up. You refuel by [b]overshooting[/b] — growing past the goal converts

the surplus into fuel. So the safe, exact-change harvest keeps you alive and gets you nowhere.

The greedy one is what moves you.

The dirt is permanent

Clear a plot and it hands you its soil. Soil doesn't get consumed — it gets banked,

and every plot you clear raises how much of it you can lay down. Placing it permanently

unlocks new tiles on your grid, for this field and every field after.

You start each run on six hexes. What the board looks like by the end is something you built.

Read the stones

Every tile you clear surveys a color. Survey enough and the map coughs up a Glyph Stone

— carved by aliens who came here before you, left behind for whoever showed up next with a

ship to decode them. Decoded glyphs are run-wide: they change how crops score, how soil

behaves, what a day costs.

The colors you chase determine which glyphs you're offered, so routing across the map is

deck-building by other means. Beat a world's boss and you're offered a cross-color legend

— the rare glyphs that belong to two colors at once, and the ones that decide what a run

actually becomes.

Choose the route, live with it

The map is one continuous hex world that grows outward as you explore it. You only ever move

outward — no backtracking, no second visit. Each step offers a small fan of choices: a safe

flatland, a hostile specialty field, a workshop to upgrade a crop, a lab to splice two into

something new.

Everything on that fan costs fuel to reach. That's the run: a series of small, honest

questions about what you can afford.

No villain. Nothing is hunting you. You are just very far from home, and home is expensive.

Lose and you're not punished — you're still stranded. Try a different route.