A satirical fantasy roguelike deckbuilder about magic, paperwork and deeply questionable career choices.
Build a deck. Collect relics. Fight monsters. Try not to violate departmental policy.
Click the button above or download:
Bureaucrats-and-Broomsticks-Windows-x64.zip
Right-click the downloaded ZIP and choose Extract All.
Do not run the game from inside the ZIP.
Open the extracted folder and double-click:
Bureaucrats-and-Broomsticks.exe
Keep the EXE and the included _internal folder together.
No installation and no Python setup are required.
Windows may display a warning because this independent beta build is not digitally signed. Choose More info → Run anyway to start it.
Magic has not disappeared.
It has been licensed, archived, audited and assigned to the appropriate department.
Choose one of nine unusual professions and fight through five acts of increasingly hostile bureaucracy:
The City → The Archives → The Green Docket → The Licensing Labyrinth → The Divine Ledger
Build your deck, collect relics, combine status effects and survive enemies ranging from street-level administrative problems to divine accounting.
| 📋 Bureaucrat | 🪄 Failed Wizard | 🗡️ Guild Assassin Apprentice |
| 🌿 Hedge Witch | ⚰️ Mortuary Apprentice | 🕯️ Night Watch Recruit |
| 🐀 Sewer Diplomat | 🍄 Shroomancer | 🧹 Witch Clerk |
Each class has its own cards, resources, mechanics and ways to create an administrative disaster.
Choose carefully.
Human Resources will not accept responsibility for the consequences.
All available choices are displayed directly in the terminal.
- Enter a displayed number to choose a class, route, card, target or reward.
- Type
endto finish your combat turn. - Type
logto view the complete combat log. - Type
quitto leave the game.
Enemy intents, health, block, energy, card costs and active statuses are shown during combat.
- Nine playable classes
- Five complete acts
- Class-specific decks and mechanics
- Normal, elite and boss encounters
- Multi-enemy combat
- Relics, statuses and resources
- Shops, rewards and narrative events
- Branching map routes
- Deterministic seeded runs
- Automated balancing and simulation tools
This is a playable systems beta. Balance, presentation and individual mechanics may continue to change.
Unexpected combinations are encouraged.
Crashes are not.
Please include your chosen class, what happened and any visible error message.
Have an idea for a card, relic, curse, resource, enemy action or completely unreasonable status effect?
Submit it to the Community Card Forge.
Your idea may become a design challenge for the next generation of the engine.
Bureaucrats and Broomsticks became a large experiment in deterministic combat, data-driven content and automated playtesting.
Its architectural limits led directly to:
A modular C# roguelike deckbuilding engine designed so that new mechanics extend the system instead of becoming another hardcoded exception.
Star this repository if the premise made you smile.
Follow @Paranoidgrinch to watch the next mechanics, classes and strange worlds take shape.
Small studio. Careful craft. Unusual worlds.