Cards on the table. People on the streets.
A single-player roguelike about reclaiming a city, one neighborhood, one person, one hand at a time.
Show of Hands is a single-player roguelike that mashes hex-map strategy with asymmetric card combat. You lead a scrappy activist cell trying to reclaim a city from the systems that run it. On the map, you choose where to push, where to hold, and where to fall back. In combat, you don't duel. You organize. Every card in your deck is a person you've rallied to the cause.
Push too hard and the system notices. Police mobilize. Corporations squeeze. Media reshapes the story. And a hardline authoritarian fringe waits for things to fall apart enough to take over. Take losses and the pressure eases; they think they've got you under control. Push back at the right moment and you might just flip enough of the city to make the movement unstoppable.
Win means a city that no longer needs you. Lose means a movement ground down by an opposition that never stops escalating.
Every card in your deck represents someone you've rallied: a neighbor, an organizer, a shop owner, a sympathetic insider. There's no abstraction layer between the people fighting and the cards in your hand. Lose a neighborhood and the people who lived there are gone from your deck. Stakes you can hold in your hand.
You don't have a health bar. The opposition isn't another player. Combat is a puzzle of pressure: you've got a limited window to break a tile's resistance before the system grinds you down. Push hard, push smart, or retreat and try again later. A failed attack isn't a death. It's a setback that leaves a mark.
Heat is a global pressure gauge. It rises with every action, every capture, every win, and four factions escalate in response. But when you take losses, heat drops. The state thinks it's got you contained, eases the pressure, and looks the other way for a beat. Every defeat is a window. Every win is a target on your back.
Procedural generation per run: city size scales from a compact town to a sprawling metropolis, with randomized tile layouts, card pools, and faction starting positions. Built for runs you can finish in a sitting, with the depth to keep coming back.
A near-future city under the thumb of overlapping systems of control. The oppression here isn't cartoon villainy. It's structural. Police enforce order. Corporations own the infrastructure. Media manufactures consent. And on the fringes, an extremist authoritarian faction exploits the chaos to push for harsher control.
The city is built from distinct neighborhoods: residential blocks, commercial strips, industrial zones, civic centers, the margins. Each has its own people. Each has its own appetite for change.
Card art for Show of Hands isn't going to have a unified style. That's the point. One card might be a linocut print. Another a photograph. Another a marker sketch. Another a digital painting. Real movements are collages of voices and media; a zine table doesn't have a brand guide.
We're working with artists from real movements, real community spaces. The kind of work you'd actually see on a flyer, a wheatpaste, a community board. The card frames, the typography, and the UI hold the line so the game stays readable. Everything inside the frame is allowed to be its own thing.
Show of Hands is in active development. We're heads-down on the prototype right now: core systems, combat feel, faction behavior. We'll have more to show when it's worth showing.
No microtransactions. No battle passes. No live service. Just a game.
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