Tearable Choices

Welcome to Pack Night. Please do not eat the silica packets.

Tearable Choices is a roguelite about ripping booster packs. Each pack you open scores points, and each card you pull asks whether you sell it, keep it or grade it. Play alone, head to head with a friend, or with up to four at one table.

Pull up a folding chair at the local card shop. In front of you sits a factory-sealed booster box of Glimmerwild: First Light. Your hands are sweating. Your bank account is screaming. Your spouse is suspicious. It's time to rip.

Rip It Open

Drag your thumb across the top of the foil and breathe in that fresh factory ink. The cards come out face down. Flip them one at a time and slow-roll the last two.

Rarer cards get bigger reveals. A Legendary, or any card with an Astral or Gilded finish, stops the room with a spotlight, its sell price and fireworks. Gilded cards are serial numbered, all the way down to 1 of 1.

Opening Packs Is the Combat

The creatures in the pack you just ripped add their ATK to Attack. The creatures in your Binder add their PWR to Power. The pack scores Attack × Power, and that number is your Hype.

Matching factions make pull patterns like a Pair, a Trio, a Rainbow or a Full Stack. Spend a Swap to throw a card back for a new one, drag the cards into the order that scores best, then watch every creature strike.

Each row of the box has a Hype quota. Meet it and you go shopping. Miss it and the box is busted.

Sell It, Keep It or Grade It

Every pull is a small crisis of conscience.

• Sell it for cash to spend on singles, Supplies and Upgrades at the shop counter.
• Keep it in your Binder, where its PWR counts for every pack you rip after that.
• Grade it. Mail it to Slabworks and pray to the cardboard gods. Every card has four hidden subgrades. A Gem Mint 10 comes back worth three times as much, with bigger stats. A bent corner comes back worse.

Build a Binder That Breaks the Box

Binder cards never sleep. Every card in the set does something from your Binder: extra strikes, doubled ATK, cash, more PWR for every Rare you pull. Stack them and push the numbers until the table starts smoking.

Somewhere in the box are 24 Deities. While one is awake in your Binder, its Presence rewrites a rule of the box. One makes a faction trend every row. Another rolls every chance twice. Another lets the shop put you in debt.

The Box Fights Back

Every row brings a new trend. One faction sells for 50% more, and one of 50 trend bonuses changes how the row plays. From Row 3 on, debuffs make each row harder.

We built in a coping mechanism. Heat rises with every pack that has nothing Epic or better in it, and the more Heat you have, the better your odds on the next pack. We call it strategic despair.

The Gauntlet

Take your Binder down three painted roads. Each road ends at a champion: a shop regular in a homemade costume, playing a persona, with a rule of their own and opinions about your deck. There are nine champions, and each gauntlet draws three of them. Pick a god before you set out, collect prizes from the fights, and earn season coins from bronze to diamond.

Rip With Friends

Versus

Two players, the same box, different packs. Every pack you score knocks its Hype off your rival's HP. Spend cash on table cards to shrink their next pack, take a Swap, halve their Heat or put a Binder card to sleep right before it pops off. Whoever leads the box carries a bounty.

Co-op

Up to four players pool their Hype toward one quota each row, against the Leviathan, a god from outside the world who is all eyes and mouths. He plays his own cards on the table, and once you're halfway to the quota he rages. Pass each other Swaps, Heat and cash, or put up a shield for a friend. Or keep your cash for that holo. Nobody has to know.

What's in the Box (Besides Regret)

• 576 cards to collect in the Card Codex, laid out as a collector's magazine with an article on every spread.
• Five finishes: Standard, Foil, Prism, Astral and serial-numbered Gilded.
• Three tiers of financial ruin: the Booster Box, the Collector Box (more rows, more foils) and the Jumbo Case (six-card packs, and the rent is late).
• Five collectors to play as. Four unlock with Tickets, and each starts with a perk.
• The Vault, where the cards you take home from every box are kept, with the box they came from.
• Full controller support and a layout made for the Steam Deck screen.