Apprentice Ascending
A real-time card game about a wizard who is, frankly, doing his best.
Master forbidden magic. Dodge the rent. Survive the Tower. Pray for coin, study forbidden texts, and climb floor by floor before hunger and the Hunters close in.
See the tower in motion
Your tower, as a tabletop of live cards
- Real-time card game
- Single player
- 120–240 minute runs
You are a junior wizard in a tower, dragging cards onto room tiles to explore, learn spells, brew potions and make rent.
Action timers all run at once, so the pressure comes from what you left unattended rather than from a turn you were given. Every part of the game state is a physical card: your health, your money, your mood and your problems all sit on the table, and all of them can be lost.
Recipes are found by experiment, floors are explored one room at a time, and every hour spent on one thing is an hour the rent and your own mood carry on without you. Runs end permanently, and most endings are bad.
What waits in the tower
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Everything is a card
Health, coin, mood and problems all live on the table as objects you drag.
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Rooms run on real time
Six room tiles, overlapping countdowns, and no turn to hide behind.
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Discovery over instruction
Recipes are found by experiment, never explained in a tutorial.
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A four-floor tower
Each floor with its own encounters, quests, reagents and boss.
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Seven endings
Seven ways for a run to end, and most of them are bad.
The Apprentice is you.
It sits on the table like everything else. Place it on a room to do the work yourself, and it returns to where you left it once the room resolves. Leave it idle and nothing about you improves.
It is the card that prays in the Chapel, bargains in the Tavern, and walks up the Stairwell into whatever is waiting. Rituals in the Chamber raise its rank, and rank is what gates the climb: each floor demands a wizard further along than the last.
One loop per floor, with the clock always running
- Stairwell
Explore
Send the Apprentice up the Stairwell. Encounters, traps, loot and the floor's boss are all waiting.
- Chapel or Tavern
Gather & trade
Pray for the townsfolk, take quests, and bargain with villagers who will not wait around.
- Chamber
Learn & cast
A scroll and the right essences write a spell. Casting leaves dust, and dust is evidence.
- Rank-up ritual
Rank up
Feed the ritual, take the next rank, cast the Ascend spell and leave the floor behind.
Meanwhile: rent comes due on a fixed clock, the weather spawns moods you did not ask for, and hunters patrol for unsanctioned magic. You can pause. The problems will still be there.
From the table
Game facts
- Release
- 2027
- Platform
- PC (Steam)
- Genre
- Deckbuilder · Magic · Fantasy · 2D
- Players
- Single player
- Runs
- 120–240 minutes
- Developer
- Bluebuck Games
The tower is waiting.
Wishlist on Steam to hear when it launches, or play the first floor free today.