Fhtagn Simulator

Outside of combat games and dungeon crawls, there’s a growing category of roguelikes that add roguelike mechanics like deck-building and metaprogression onto a preexisting game type: Chess-likes, billiards-likes, Scrabble-likes, and many more. Fhtagn Simulator is a roulette-like.
Every round, a set number of cards (usually 12) are drawn from your deck and placed randomly on the wheel. The cards then activate in order. When activated, every card yields a certain amount of Spirit, the game’s currency, and may have additional powers such as destroying adjacent cards, drawing more cards from the deck, raising the Spirit value of another card, and so on. So far, so simple. But these basic mechanics conceal a surprising depth of strategy.
A true indie production by a three-person team, Fhtagn Simulator has a certain amount of homemade charm, from the pixel-art graphics to the sound effects featuring what I’m pretty sure is one of the devs saying the word “roar.” I genuinely love little games like this (and no, for those who don’t know me, I’m not being ironic). And it captures the Lovecraft tone unexpectedly well.
Like Monster Train, a good Fhtagn Simulator strategy relies on using these stacking effects to create runaway high scores. But while this created difficulties when trying to optimize your combat strategy in Monster Train, here it works perfectly. Since you’re only ever trying to beat a set Spirit value and it’s only checked every seven spins, it’s not prone to the combat-game problem of “this one mook slipped past with 1 hp and ruined my plan.” It just doesn’t matter if your estimate is a bit off — a general vibe that this combination will create a big multiplier is usually sufficient. Then sit back and watch the Spirit roll in.
Fittingly for a Cthulhu-mythos game, nearly every strategy has this type of pyrrhic element, from Burning (which reduces a card’s Spirit) to Freezing (which prevents cards from activating) to spells (which have a negative Spirit value). The strategies with the best potential for runaway victories can also lead to catastrophic losses.
The real pleasure here is the sheer breadth of strategies you can pursue, and how different they all feel. A few have associated achievements, but many do not; they exist purely to make the curious go “I wonder if I could…” And the trick to some of them can be quite challenging to divine.
Read my full analysis on Medium:

Very pleasantly surprised by my first encounter with a Chinese indie game and I must say it sets the bar high. For a past-time game is super immersive and creative. Also lovely art style.
Highly recommend for fans of the Cthulhu mythos as the developers seem to incorporate unique mechanics for each eldritch horror god and has Easter eggs and references incorporated all over the place.
Lovely game. Name reads as "Fhtagn Simulator"
Also, I love the King in Yellow and his theatre feature. Won me most of the levels.
First win - Shub Niggurath
Longest win - Cthugha
Best score - Cthugha
Most wins - King in Yellow
Win on lvl 10 - Cthulhu

Solid, bite-sized luck be a landlord-like game, with a very interesting card pool mechanic (you get to fix some positions of cards, you can expand your board by drawing, investigators enter your deck and interfere at higher difficulties). I have played MANY roguelikes, and this one has enough interesting flavor to be worth checking out!

Pros: Great flavor/lore
High build variety, most synergies have multiple options (particularly the ones that sacrifice humans and also benefit a specific subtype), mechanics interplay interestingly (fire destroys, freeze stacks well with high spirit), or you can just stack synergy cards
Most translation errors mentioned in other reviews have been fixed!
Cards explore the "Ring of Pain" style wheel format in lots of interesting ways
The game lets you shape your build by picking or banning "card packs"
There is a lot of choice due to the slot locking mechanic, most other games in this genre don't give you agency over the board like this game does

Neutral:
The playthroughs are quite short, almost coffee break if you play on high speed

Cons:
I think the monochromatic color palette makes it a little hard to track at high speeds.
Most strategies have two "payoff" cards, often a location and an elder god. If you invest in a strategy and don't see it, you WILL lose, which sometimes makes the game feel fairly RNG.
Pivoting builds when you find a powerful card is often impossible, because eliminating cards from your deck costs increasing amounts of spirit.
Endless is fairly boring, there aren't any degenerate "big numbers" strategies as there are few true multipliers, and mechanics like "might" and "multiple" reset every round

A very simple game with even simpler premise, fun and addicting.
For me a sipritual successor of Survivors games.
Fuck 'em snakes, embrace the Shub!
Very R'lyeh, highly recommended.

The card descriptions could have been done better to make learning easier. Then you just ✝✝✝profit ✝✝✝

its a really unique rouglike deckbuilder, I havn't seen anything exactly like it
the mood is really well done, and I like the black and white color scheme

english localization is a little clunky in places but doesn't hold the game back too much. Quite enjoyable to find the perfect combination of things to break the game open and get tons of spirits, my best endless I lost with around 7 million. Might like it if endless scaled a little more quickly though, I had to go to sleep partway through the run and it took several hours (mostly because I was drawing 100 cards per turn, and activating each of them twice. King in yellow goes silly). Could use more polish though, since there seem to be some builds that just don't really go anywhere fast enough (can't build a freezing deck that actually wins rounds early enough) whereas king in yellow (especially with foresee) is easy to build and scales fast, so I pretty much only go for that one build, or sometimes the fire one. Decks with lots of monsters are hard to manage compared to humans if you ever want to draw them. Stranger in particular is hard to work with even though it seems like it'd be a match made in heaven for king in yellow, since they count as monster cards so foresee won't draw 100% of the deck with them. Still fun.