Aschefall is live – Reigns meets Slay the Spire, free in your browser, 240+ cards

Reading note: this post is also available in German.

What Aschefall is (3 sentences)

Aschefall is a browser-based card roguelite mixing Reigns-style daily choices with Slay-the-Spire-style deck-building. You run a post-apocalyptic bunker called Bunker-117 for 30 days, balancing 4 resources (Food, Energy, Morale, Defense) and a deck of 250+ event cards. If any resource hits zero, your bunker dies – if you reach Day 30, you are asked: open the gate, stay silent, or walk into the ash?

Why post-apocalypse?

I did not want a heroic „save the world“ framing. Most post-apoc games (Fallout, Wasteland) are heros-journey arcs at their core – you become the Vault Master, the Wanderer, the Savior. Aschefall does the opposite. You are just a caretaker of a too-cramped concrete container with too little of everything. There is no quest. There are only 30 days. If you survive them, that was it.

How it plays

Each day you draw 3 event cards. Each card has 2-3 choices with different effects. Example:

Raiders at the Gate (Threat)
Three men with tools. They look hungry.

• Fight → -2 Defense, +1 Morale, +1 Scrap
• Negotiate → -2 Food, +1 Defense, +1 Morale
• Ignore → -2 Morale, +2 Scrap

Reigns-style – fast decisions, consequences immediately visible on the resource bars. But every 7 days the Workshop opens: you can upgrade one card from your deck (+1 to all positive effects, permanent for the run), remove one (deck-thinning), or skip for +3 Scrap. That is the Slay-the-Spire side – slow strategic deck optimization.

Plus the usual roguelite suspects: 6 boss days (5/10/15/20/25/30), a 10-tier Heat / Ascension system (Slay-the-Spire-style cumulative escalations), Daily Mode with deterministic seed for a global leaderboard, a Tag-Synergy system, and NPC persistence: picked-up wanderers (Medic, Engineer, Child) become daily encounter cards.

Why free?

1. No Steam wishlist gauntlet. Steam indie only works if you arrive at launch with several thousand wishlists. I dont have those.
2. Mobile-first. Aschefall was built mobile-first from day one (touch targets ≥36px, dvh instead of vh, safe-area padding, anti-zoom fixes).
3. I just wanted to make it. Aschefall was a side project that grew bigger than planned. Money was never part of the design process – so it costs nothing.

Tech stack

Vanilla React UMD + Babel-standalone JIT-compile. No npm, no webpack, no Next.js. index.html loads React from unpkg, Babel-standalone JITs JSX in the browser. Deploy via paramiko SFTP. State management = one single reducer. Backend Node + Express + SQLite WAL for Auth + Leaderboard + Cloud-Save + Newsletter broadcast. Runs 60Hz on a 5-year-old phone.

What is next

1. Map-choice a la Slay the Spire (tree instead of linear 30 days). Breaks save schema, needs a major release.
2. Faction reputation – Traders / Guards / Nomads with their own rep + endgame events from Day 25.
3. Continuous new cards and balance tuning.

Play

• talura.app/aschefall – primary version with cloud-save + leaderboard
• lern-digital.de/aschefall – static mirror (no login required)
• news.html – Changelog + Roadmap

If you find something broken, email me: info@ka77.de. Really.