A card game about debt. You take a deck of cards into a dungeon. You fight your way to the bottom. If you get out alive, you keep what you found. If you die, you lose most of it.
The game is free. Nothing inside it costs money. It does not need the internet.
The Cinder Knight waits at the bottom of the Slag Pits. You were told his name, and what he does, before you chose to go down there.
Pick your machine. Download the file. Open it. There is no installer and no account.
| download | opening it | |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | TheOwing-windows-x86_64.zip (81 MB) |
Unzip and run TheOwing.exe. Windows shows a blue "unrecognised app" box the first time — click More info, then Run anyway |
| macOS | TheOwing-macos-universal.zip (102 MB) |
Unzip, then right-click the app and choose Open (not double-click) so macOS offers you the Open button |
| Linux | TheOwing-linux-x86_64.zip (72 MB) |
Unzip, then run TheOwing.x86_64. If it will not start, mark it executable first: chmod +x TheOwing.x86_64 |
| Android phone or tablet | TheOwing-android.apk (96 MB) |
Copy it to your phone and tap it. Android 7 or newer. If it says App not installed, delete the older copy first |
Sizes read from the current build by tools/readme_downloads.sh — not typed here,
because typed ones were three megabytes stale and nobody could tell (D207).
Every version, on one page → The table above holds
the current release. That page lists every version, each with its own downloads. At the bottom of
it sits the rolling build of main, which is today's work and changes on every push.
Your computer will warn you the first time. This is normal and it is not about this game. Windows and macOS warn about any program that does not carry a paid publishing certificate. This one does not have such a certificate. The steps in the table get you past the warning. On Android the same thing takes the form of allowing an app from outside the Play Store.
It is a prototype. You can play it from start to finish. One person makes it, it changes several times a day, and things will move under you. Your saved game stays on your own machine. Nothing goes to a server.
Choose where to go. Every dungeon tells you what you face before you enter. You learn how hard it is, what waits at the bottom, and what that thing does. It also names the cards that drop only down there. A difficulty never surprises you.
Take a debt, if you want the risk. Each door offers you a deal. You pay gold now, and the dungeon asks one thing of you in return. Clear it. Or reach the bottom whatever it costs. Or get through without ever being caught in the open. Meet the terms and your gold comes back with interest, plus a sealed pack of cards. Fail and the gold is gone.
Go down. A dungeon is a building, drawn from above at an angle. It has rooms, corridors and several floors, and you explore it one tile at a time. Step into a room and you see all of it. Step into a corridor and you see almost nothing.
Everything down there walks toward you. Nothing sits on a square and waits for you. From the moment you reach a floor, the things on it come for you. If you are slow, they start to move twice for your once. When something reaches you, you can fight it. You can also shake it off, which costs health and one turn — and everything else uses that turn to get closer.
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| You know what is down there before you go. | A floor is a building, not a board. |
Fight with your deck. Each turn you draw a hand and spend energy on cards. You hit, raise a guard, poison, or make yourself stronger. Every enemy shows what it will do next, so a turn is a puzzle and not a gamble. Some enemies watch what you did last turn and change their plan.
Look around while you are down there. Floors hide chests, keys in far corners, and walls that open if you notice the mark on them. One stone will change the rest of the floor for a price. Some floors hold an open ledger with a job written in it. Deal this much damage. Open every chest. Win a fight without playing an attack. Settle the job and it pays.
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 |
| Read any card in the middle of a turn. | A chest shows you what kind of lock it has. |
Then get out. Everything you pick up is held, not banked. Beat the thing at the bottom and it is yours for good. Die on the way and you lose a share of it, and how much comes home depends on how deep you got. Reach the bottom and half of it still survives. The game never takes what you already owned. That is the whole tension. The deeper you go, the more you carry, and the more one bad turn costs you.
Relics are lent, not kept. Elites and chests lay out three of them and you take one. It works for the rest of the run. Then it is gone, whether you win or lose. What you keep is the record that you met it.
Between runs you build. Duplicate cards fuse into stronger ones. Gold buys powers and raises their level. Each place you beat opens another. Sometimes it opens a back way into a neighbour, one floor shorter, with all the same fights packed into it.
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| The collection is the progress. | Three powers are dealt at the door. You take one. |
| Cards | 100. Each has its own illustration and each can be levelled |
| Enemies | 35 kinds, plus 12 named bosses — one for each dungeon |
| Places | 12 dungeons across 5 regions, from gentle to genuinely hard |
| Relics and powers | 38 relics, lent for one run — 30 powers, three dealt at the door |
| Things to find | events, chests, hidden rooms, riddles, altars |
| Jobs and debts | 45 floor jobs and 16 debts, drawn from what you actually did |
One run takes between fifteen minutes and an hour. The length depends on how deep the place is, and on how much of it you turn over.
Tell me which build you played. The title screen prints the version in the corner, and Settings shows it under Build. That string names the exact code you ran. A file name does not, because every release names its files the same way. Then open an issue.
Known rough edges, so that you do not waste time on them:
- Android has never been tested on a real phone. It installs and runs. Text size on a small screen is the most likely thing to be wrong.
- There is no iPhone or iPad version yet. The build exists and does not work.
- On NixOS, the Linux build needs
steam-run— see BUILD.md.
This part is for developers. If you only want to play, everything you need is above.
The game is built in Godot 4.7, in GDScript. All of its content is data files rather than code, so a new card or a new enemy is a data task. There are 50 test suites. One of them walks every screen and every dungeon and checks that the player always has something to press.
./run.sh # play it from source (needs Godot 4.7 on PATH, or set GODOT=)
tests/run.sh # run everything, in parallel| AGENTS.md | what the game is, and the rules that keep changes from breaking it |
| DESIGN.md | every decision, what was measured, and what broke — the real documentation |
| CONTRIBUTING.md | how to add content |
| BUILD.md | building and running on each platform |
| ART.md | what it should look like, and every asset |
Two things are worth knowing before you change anything. scripts/balance.gd is the only place
tuning lives, so the game and the headless simulator cannot drift apart. A duplicated table once
made the first dungeon unplayable. And tuning is measured, not guessed: tools/sim_balance.gd
plays fights by itself and reports completion rates. Several designs that read well on paper were
reverted when the numbers came back.
Code is Apache 2.0.
The art under assets/art/ was generated for this project and is not CC0. It covers the title
illustration, the 27 backdrops, the 35 enemy plates, the 100 card illustrations and the computed
frame kit. See assets/art/README.md. The five music loops are ours too. See their
PROVENANCE.txt. Every sound effect and every music track comes out of one synthesiser built for
this game (tools/audio_voices.py). It replaced three bought sound packs that made the game sound
like three different games.
Two typefaces come from outside this project. Both are under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Cinzel by Natanael Gama sets the headings.
Fira Sans by Carrois Corporate & Edenspiekermann sets
everything else. Each one ships its own OFL.txt in assets/art/fonts/.
The pixel art in assets/pixel/ is CC0 by Kenney — 1-Bit Pack and
Pattern Pack Pixel. Kenney's work is public domain and needs no attribution. It is given here
because it is deserved.