Get Well Soon

About the game

The illness makes you strong, but you are losing control. In the frozen wastes you find a cave that is rumoured to contain a cure, and it is your last hope. Get Well Soon turns a roguelike into a card game: you walk a dungeon of ice and ruins one turn at a time, but everything you can do beyond walking is a card in your hand.

Moving costs one power. Each card has its own power cost, and playing a card sends it to the "spent" pile. When your power reaches zero, whatever cards are left in your hand go to the "waste" pile and you draw a fresh hand from the deck, with your power reset to its maximum. Some actions burn a card for good. When you go down to the next level, the hand and the spent and waste piles are shuffled back into the deck, but the burnt pile stays out of play, so the way you spend cards shapes the deck you will have later. Cards do things such as summoning a block that lasts a few turns, attacking an adjacent square, teleporting to a visible square, freezing an enemy, healing, laying spike traps or leaving caltrops behind as you move.

The map has six levels, and between fights you find upgrades: a cleansing flame that destroys a card from your waste pile for good, a cursed altar that improves you but shuffles a cursed card into your deck, and a plentiful fountain that gives you more cards. Enemies are shown as letters: a lowercase letter has one hit point, an uppercase letter has two, and an underlined one has three. With only a few points of life, every decision about when to move and when to play a card matters.

Playing it here

Click Play. The game is drawn with coloured text and big card panels at the bottom of a grid that scales to the frame. It is played with the keyboard, saves the game in this browser only and makes no requests outside this site.

Controls

Tips

Watch your power. A hand empties itself when power hits zero, so sometimes it is better to play a cheap card than to move.

Burn what you do not need. The cleansing flame permanently removes a card from your waste pile; thin out the weak ones.

Take the cursed altar carefully. The upgrade is real, and so is the cursed card you shuffle into your deck.

FAQ

How many levels are there? Six, as the Level counter at the top left shows.

Where do the cards come from? You start with a deck of seventeen and add cards from fountains and altars as you go.

Does it save? Yes: the game keeps itself in this browser, and the menu has Resume and Save and Quit; reopening the page offers to resume.

Credits and licence

Get Well Soon was made by Stephen Sherratt (gridbugs) for the 7DRL Challenge 2019 and is released under the MIT licence. It is written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly by us from the author's source at a fixed commit; the page code comes from the author's prototty library (MIT, from npm), and the Rust crates it uses are listed in the licence file. The pixel font is PxPlus IBM CGA (and its thin variant) by VileR, from the Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack at int10h.org, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-SA 4.0). The files are the ones in the game's repository, served unchanged. We replaced the author's web page with our own (it blocks connections outside this site and scales the display to the frame) and keep the saved game in the browser's local storage, under a key of its own, instead of IndexedDB. The licence texts, the source and the build script are linked from this page.