Games Like BROODHOUSE

Your power is in the cards you can't draw.

Every creature card belongs to a strain. Play one and it doesn't hit for the number printed on it — it hits for the entire population of that strain, everywhere in your deck at once. Draw pile, discard, hand, all of it counts. You never need to find the right card. You only need it to exist.

Every card asks the same question, every turn.

HARVEST it for damage now, or SOW it to breed more of its strain and hit harder for the rest of the run. There is no energy bar. Your hand refills to five and every card in it is yours to spend — the cost of sowing is simply the damage you chose not to deal. Greed has an axis: go deep on one strain for a multiplier that collapses all at once, or go wide for something steady that never spikes.

Carrying capacity is the ceiling. Going over it is how you get ammunition.

Every strain has its own cap. Cross it and breeding stalls, the end of each turn spits Feral cards into your deck, and if two strains are over at once the larger one eats the smaller. Feral cards are dead weight you cannot play. They are also the only fuel for BLOOM.

BLOOM is a bomb you build out of your own mistakes.

Six Feral cards arm it, and a permanent gauge shows exactly what detonating deals and what it costs you — so it is never a random punishment. Hold at eighteen and it goes off on its own. Every turn you wait makes the bomb bigger, the recoil worse and your hand deader. Set it off and every strain collapses back to its cap; you rebuild from half a colony.

The enemies watch what you are breeding, and they leave you a tell.

Nineteen of them, every attack telegraphed two turns ahead with a condition written underneath it. Meet the condition before you end your turn and the blow lands light. The check reads your colony at the moment you stop — so the forecast is never only "how much is this going to hurt," it is "what am I allowed to do this turn."

Every run runs on different physics.

You sign a Contract before you pick a single strain, and it rewrites the rules for the whole run — one restriction and one compensation, never just "harder this time." Drought crushes every cap but breeds you an extra creature. Bare Hands takes PRUNE away entirely. Monoculture gives you one strain instead of two, then makes it enormous. Choke doubles your overflow and lets you detonate twice as early.

The run ends on a sheet worth posting.

Win or die, you get a Herbarium specimen page: the strains you raised, the mutations that drifted into them, your peak population, your Blooms, the Contract you signed. Ten strains, three visible growth stages each, six heritable mutations — the colony you finish with is not one anybody else has had.

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