LoreGBC

A compact card-dungeon roguelike for the Game Boy Color.  Fight your way through an endless deck of monsters, collect powerful abilities, and decide when to escape with your treasure—or risk everything by going deeper.

Lore is played on a 3x3 board populated with potions, weapons, monsters, traps, and treasure represented by standard playing cards. One card is your avatar. Your avatar interacts with adjacent cards, and interacting with most cards discards that card, moves your avatar onto that space, and deals a new card into the space your avatar just left.

Hearts heal, diamonds provide equipment, and spades and clubs are enemies. You can also swap places with adjacent cards, but after swapping you must take another successful action (e.g., interacting with another card) before swap can be used again.

Equipment gives your avatar a new weapon and armor based on the equipment card's value (e.g., an Ace gives 14 armor). Armor reduces damage from enemies (e.g., if you have 8 armor and attack a 10 of spades, you only take 2 damage). New weapons can defeat any enemy (discarding them), but the weapon's durability becomes the defeated enemy card's value (e.g., attacking an 8 of clubs lowers weapon durability to 8). Your avatar can only attack enemies that are lower than your weapon's durability, until you find and equip new equipment (e.g., with 8 durability you cannot attack a 10 of spades, but you can attack a 7 of clubs, which will reduce your weapon's durability to 7).

You also have Punch, a default offhand attack that ignores durability, allowing you to defeat any enemy. However, your armor does not reduce damage when Punching an enemy. As you play, reward rooms offer perks and limited-use offhand abilities that add new ways to heal, move, fight, manipulate cards, or survive bad positions.

When the deck runs out, the discard pile is shuffled back in, a skull card is added, and a reward room appears. Skulls are dangerous enemies with special effects, so the board becomes harder the longer a run continues.

Every third shuffle spawns a treasure chest. Opening a chest ends the run and awards a gem, a persistent bonus that increases the chance to receive specific perks and offhands in future runs. Destroying a chest continues the run but creates a trap that stays on the board, taking up space and making subsequent turns harder to navigate. Later chests have better odds for rarer and more powerful gems.

There are also rare collectable armors hidden deep within the dungeon.

A tutorial is available in game for new players.

Controls

Game Boy:	Keyboard:	Use:
Directional Pad	WASD	Move card selection.
Start	Return	Hold start and press (UP) for information about the selected card; (DOWN) for information about current offhand; (LEFT OR RIGHT) to change current offhand.
Select	Space	Swap with selected card.
A Button	K	Use offhand.
B Button	J	Interact with selected card (attack enemy, take equipment, drink potion).

Game Boy Color and PC versions available

The ROM can be played in an emulator (please note some emulators handle digitized speech poorly. I strongly recommend SameBoy); the MiSTer; on one of the many emulation handhelds; or on original hardware, the Mod Retro Chromatic, the Analogue Pocket, or the FunnyPlaying GBC using a flash cart like the Everdrive.

In addition to the Game Boy Color ROM, a standalone Windows version of the game is also available for download based on the SameBoy emulator. The PC version has gamepad support and its keyboard controls can be viewed and remapped in the accompanying INI configuration file.

Feedback

Please provide any feedback, and report any bugs or issues, in the discussion board below. I will provide updates to correct any issues.

Contributions; Licenses; & Acknowledgements

• Made with gbdk.org

• Music contributed by gbtje.itch.io
• Key art by dmbednarski.art

• SameBoy (Expat License, Copyright (c) 2015-2026 Lior Halphon)

• VWF (MIT License, Copyright (c) 2020 Toxa)
• SDL 2 (zlib License, Copyright (c) 1997-2026 Sam Lantinga)
• Title screen icon modified from Hydra by Lorc (CC BY 3.0).
• Typography: Manufacturing Consent by Fredrick Brennan and Press Start 2P by Cody "CodeMan38" Boisclair (both licensed under SIL OFL 1.1).
• SFX purchased from beatscribe.itch.io

• Inspired by Scoundrel, the 2011 solo card game by Zach Gage and Kurt Bieg. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Zach Gage or Kurt Bieg.

Full license information is available for download and included with both versions of the game.