Deadstead

Your compound against the dead.

Deadstead is a base-defence roguelite played in days and nights. By day you work the map: build and upgrade, repair the walls, take one card into a build that stays with you all run, and send scouting parties out the gate for food, ammo and strangers worth keeping. By night the dead arrive, your guards hold the wall, and once a night you can rush them to whichever stretch is about to crack.

Hordes come on days 15, 30 and 45. Holding the day-45 horde is the win. Falling is normal, and everything you earned comes home with you: scrip for permanent structures that stand in every future run, new cards into the pool, higher difficulty tiers for those who endure.

The design rule behind all of it: deterministic and visible. No luck-gated grinds, no hidden rolls. The watchtower tells you what is coming tonight, every cost is a number you can read, and two runs on the same seed with the same choices play out identically.

What is in this prototype

- A full run arc: day planning, auto-resolved nights with stances and the once-a-night rush, hordes at days 15, 30 and 45

- 47 cards, 4 synergies, 12 survivor traits

- Scouting expeditions: 6 destinations, 51 seeded text events with choices that can feed, arm, injure or bury your people

- Permanent progression across runs: scrip, a 10-node tree, 6 compound structures, 18 milestones, 5 ascension tiers

- Save export and import from the Menu

This is a proof of concept. If you play a run or two, the comments below are exactly where I want to hear about it, especially:

1. When your run ended, did you want to start another? Why, or why not?

2. Do scouting expeditions feel worth the guards they take off the wall?

3. When an expedition event offered choices, did they feel worth choosing and could you guess the outcome?

Found a bug? Open the Menu, export your save, and attach or describe it in a comment with the file. The seed and day are in the export, and they let me replay exactly what you saw.

Practical notes

- Desktop browsers only for now; Chrome or Firefox recommended

- Your save lives in this browser. Clearing site data clears it, so export anything you care about