Banners of Ruin

Banners of Ruin is a deckbuilding roguelite with a party-based twist, set in the fur-and-steel fantasy world of Dawn's Point. Where most card games hand you a single hero and a shuffle, MonteBearo gives you up to six characters at once, each pulling from their own pool of unlockable cards and class abilities. The result is a combat system that rewards thinking about party composition almost as much as individual card picks. A bear warrior stacking rage synergies alongside a rat rogue fishing for poison procs feels genuinely different from a cleric-heavy support build, and that build variety is the game's clearest strength. The structure is classic roguelite: a run takes you through a series of encounters across Dawn's Point, with branching paths, shop stops, and event nodes breaking up the fights. Each run is short enough to finish in a couple of hours, which makes the "one more run" pull real. The city itself has background lore about warring noble houses and a resistance movement, and while the narrative framing is thin, it gives the setting just enough texture to make the faction-flavored cards feel grounded rather than arbitrary. Do not come here expecting Disco Elysium levels of writing. Do come here for the quiet satisfaction of a deck that suddenly clicks into a killing machine around the third floor. What works less well is the difficulty curve and the run variance. Early unlocks feel underpowered, meaning new players will lose runs not because of interesting strategic failure but because the card pool is too shallow. Once you have more cards in rotation, the game opens up considerably, but grinding to that point can feel like padding, especially when you hit a run that simply refuses to offer the card types your composition needs. The AI is not complex, and combat can start to feel repetitive when synergies are not flowing. Some character classes also feel noticeably stronger than others, which skews party-building toward safe picks on harder difficulties. For a certain kind of player - someone who enjoys Slay the Spire-style systems but wants the added layer of multi-character management - Banners of Ruin scratches a specific itch that few games in the genre bother with. The visual style is charming in a dark-illustrated-novel way, and the card art is consistently good. It is not going to replace your top-tier deckbuilders, and the narrative depth is basically surface level, but the mechanical question of "how do I make six very different animals fight like a unit" keeps the runs interesting well past the tutorial. If you are coming from heavy RPGs hoping for character arcs and meaningful choices, adjust expectations hard. If you are coming from deckbuilders hoping for more tactical texture, this delivers.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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