Games Like Maieutic

Maieutic is a roguelike deckbuilder where your cards are philosophers — and they argue back.

Build hands from real thinkers and let intellectual history do the scoring. Cards from the same school reinforce each other. Lineages fire across centuries — Aristotle's inheritance running through Scholasticism, Empiricism handing itself to Pragmatism. Play opposites and your multiplier collapses, because when contradicting ideas shout at once, none of them is heard.

Between rounds you choose where to go: the Agora to trade for what you're missing, a school's faculty to recruit from its lineage, or a dilemma that pays well and costs something you can't take back.

Runs end. Your school doesn't. Hire philosophers as faculty and watch them level up across runs, commit your academy to a doctrine, and grow it from a room with one teacher into an institution with a reputation. Plato founded the Academy. Aristotle left and founded his own. Now it's your turn.

The game asks you things. Is freedom real, or a story we tell about necessity? Does knowledge come from experience, or from reason? You answer — and separately, the Ledger records the hands you actually played. At the end of a run it puts both columns side by side, and your dominant philosophy reshapes the world into one of 20 different endings. Most players find out they argued for one philosophy and played another. It doesn't punish you. It just shows you.

You can play this game for the score.

People also play it to find out what Diogenes said.