Fun story: for a couple of years I had an idea about a tabletop game that would both cards (French 52-card deck) and dice (1d6). This idea went nowhere further than the traversing concept (and the draft blog post is long gone), but here's how i imagined it:

• roll 1d6
• draw that many cards from the stock face down, only turn the last one face up, the rest go at the bottom of the stock
• resolve the card

As for the card interaction, i wanted to base the stuff on objects and mobs from Shattered Pixel Dungeon, but wasn't able to come up with any correspondences between them and the cards, so this idea went stale. The only part that i was able to make tho is door cards that, when opened, force you to resolve the "hidden behind the door" object (the top card in the stock).

And this September i discovered Scoundrel, which was roughly my idea of what a card-based dungeon crawler should be like (sans, of course, dice rolls). However, there was one detail that bothered me a little: red aces and face cards are not used. So i decided to take this opportunity into my hands.

Doors and keys #

The red cards are now doors (hearts) and keys (diamonds; because they're equippable like weapons, which are diamonds):

• only the matching key can open the door
• you can equip multiple keys, unlike with weapons (where only one can be equipped at the time)
• if you resolve a door that does have a matching key, you discard the door and the key cards, draw the top card from the stock and resolve it
• if there's no matching key, discard both the door and the hidden item ("the door was the only way to that item, you won't stumble across it anyway"); there are a couple of alternative ways to resolve this, because i wasn't sure if discarding up to 4 cards just because there was no matching key was a good idea (now i think it's fine, there's 44 more cards left anyway):
  • discard the door, put the hidden item at the bottom of the stock ("the door wasn't the only way to that item, you can find it on a different route")
  • put both the door and the hidden item at the bottom of the stock ("you can reuse the door later, when you find the key")

To roll or not to roll... #

I was also thinking of how to integrate dice rolls into my version of Scoundrel:

1. like in my draft: draw the given number of cards (later N), only resolve the last drawn one
2. compromise: draw N cards, turn the last one face up and fill the room until there's 4 cards on the table

Both ways also remove the ability to flee the room, since the dice rolls already skip cards for later reuse.

Update 2026-10-03 #

Actually, fuck rolling, it gets boring too quickly too soon, and it's even more boring to program.

Multiplayer (2026-10-03) #

And I also came up with a multiplayer version of Scoundrel (i only wish i had someone to play it with). Everything is the same, except:

• every player interacts with only one card on their turn; drawing cards to fill the room doesn't burn anyone's turn
• to skip the room, the players must vote; "aye" only wins by absolute majority
• you can heal other people with potions instead of yourself (and, ofc, if you apply another potion from the same room to the same player, it won't have any effect)
  • at this point, i also thought of allowing one to equip a weapon on another player, but this'll only spoil the game or at least the experience
• if a player dies, the rest continue the adventure without them.

And, if you decide to play with doors and keys, the keychain is shared between players, so anyone can equip a key and anyone will be able to use it later.

PvP #

I'm also thinking of adding PvP, but i don't know how to activate it. It could be some cards, but:

• not red faces and aces, they must be used in the Doors & Keys expansion; also there's too many of them, the players will kill each other too soon
• jokers might be a good idea: red joker - attack the player on the left, black joker - attack the player on the right; and there's only two of them, which is better than 8 high reds, but still a bit too few; should they be unskippable?

As for exchanging damage, it's simple: the damage is your weapon minus their weapon, and vice versa (yes, they fight back), but it only kills them if the damage exceeds their HP.