Games Like Everyone Expire

Roadmap

Development update - 3 October 2026

Everyone Expire is being prepared for a small private alpha. The campaign loop, scripted tutorials, party inspection, equipment rewards and encounter minigames are in the current build. Steam achievements now have their matching badges and progress statistics; Cloud settings are configured for private testing.

Now: finish Steam delivery checks, fix bugs, and polish readability and campaign balance.

Next: a small invited alpha, with feedback on tutorials, saves, encounters and pacing.

After that: iterate on the reports, then consider a wider Steam Playtest when the build is ready.

Then: release after testing. There is no release date or public testing date to announce yet.

Testing is not open yet. Alpha and beta builds may contain bugs, balance changes and changing save compatibility. Wishlist and follow for future testing news.

About the Game

Everyone Expire is a card-driven tabletop deckbuilder that flips the genre on its head: you don't play the hero, or even the party. You play the Dungeon Master, and you're not a fair one.

Each run, you lead a party of adventurers drawn from a persistent roster (real, recurring characters, each with a class, a signature flaw, and a stack of exploitable personality traits) through a route of hand-built encounters toward a final boss lair. Play enough runs and you'll start recognising your targets before they even sit down: exactly which lie gets one of them moving, precisely what excuse it takes to keep another quiet. You choose what tempts them. You choose what hurts them. When the dice don't go your way, you have a hand of cards that says the dice were wrong.

It's part deckbuilder, part push-your-luck dungeon crawl, part dark comedy about exactly how much power a screen gives the person behind it.

The loop: BAIT → FUDGE → BETRAY → EXPIRE

Lay the trap. Let them pick it.

Every encounter, you deal bait cards onto the table (a hooded stranger, a keg of free ale, a suspiciously unguarded cellar door) and the party decides what looks worth the risk. Every card carries a DC, a payoff, and a cost if it goes wrong, across six flavours: Temptation, Trap, Social, Threat, Route and Monster. You're not forcing their hand. You're just making sure the worst option looks like the best one.

Every roll happens in the open. What happens after doesn't.

Dice land where they land, in full view, every die on screen. Then, if the result is inconvenient, you quietly play a card from the DM's Fudge Hand. Loaded Dice. Doppelgangers. A rounding error that was "always" three points worse than it looked. Nobody saw anything.

Sway one. Sway all. Watch them push back.

The party doesn't just sit there and take it. They interrupt you. Mid-encounter, one adventurer will call out to another, and you get a choice: let it go, or sacrifice a card from your own hand to make their roll harder. Every adventurer keeps a full sheet of stats, traits, afflictions and skills, so by the time you've run a few campaigns you know exactly who wards off a hex, who panics under pressure, and who's worth the card you'll burn interrupting them.

Lead them all the way to the lair. Then take the credit.

Bad ideas compound. Encounter by encounter, across a hand-authored route through themed Areas (tavern, forest, shrine, crypt, cavern and beyond), you steer a party that trusts you completely toward a boss with its own minions, phases, and orders you assign yourself. The scoring is blunt about what it wants from you: misery held above threshold, the party reached the final boss, a TPK at the lair. Nail all three and the game itself calls it a Perfectly Timed TPK.

Meet your employer

Malice didn't apply for this job. He stole it. He spent longer than he'll admit watching adventuring parties controlled from somewhere above the clouds, before he worked out that a die could be persuaded, and longer still before he worked out that misery goes further if the party lives long enough to really feel it. Now he's hiring. You're the apprentice. He supplies the contracts, the cards, and a truly relentless amount of running commentary. You supply the suffering. Done properly. With paperwork.

The party

Your party comes from a roster of recurring named adventurers, each locked to one of twelve classes, a signature flaw, and a hand of quirks stacked on top. Run to run, the faces change, but the same characters resurface, so their weaknesses stop being a surprise and start being a plan. Sometimes the quirks pair up badly. That's not a bug.

Between runs: the Study, the Codex, and a shelf you have to earn

Your DM career lives in a Study (bookshelves, a ledger, a set of dice on the desk) that fills in as you play. The Codex catalogues every bait card, fudge card and monster you've met. Talents spend a slow-burn currency called Infamy on permanent upgrades to how you run a table. Achievements range from the straightforward (survive three runs in a row, "shameful, for a bad DM") to the secret, and level-ups and selected achievements award card rewards: reveal up to three cards and keep one. Unchosen cards remain available to discover in future rewards.

Every so often, a bait card doesn't just resolve, it opens into its own wildcard minigame. In Battle of the Bards, choose the house band's instrument each round: win the set to damage the visiting bard; lose and the party gains morale.