Retromine
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NEW UPDATE OUT NOW! 25 new cards and 3 new levels! Get digging!
Dig to the center of the earth in Retromine, an incremental mining & deckbuilding roguelike! Delve into the mines, where you can play cards to mine resources and score points, and escape before the caves collapse. When you survive an expedition, spend resources you gathered to buy new cards, upgrade your deck, and create powerful card combos. Reach the core to win!
Retromine is a super challenging game - if you manage to win, post a screenshot of your victory in the comments!
Controls
General
Esc - Pause Menu
LShift - Show hotkeys
Expedition
Left click - Play cards & interact
Right click - Reorder cards in your hand & cancel a selected tool
E - End turn
D - View deck
A - View draw pile
S - View discard pile
Shop
D - View deck
G - Start next expedition
R - Reroll
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Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Thank you for the OVERWHELMING support and feedback!!8 days ago
- Community Discord & Minor Update! Demo v3.1!17 days ago
- 25 new cards, 3 new levels, huge new content update out now! Demo v3!Dec 20, 2024
- Huge new update! Demo v2!Nov 25, 2024
- Retromine full demo release!Sep 27, 2024
Comments
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i don't know if action explosion + wrench is the only viable winning strategy, but it's what got me through!
Great little game, although I have not found a second winning strategy other than spamming free/effectively free actions and finishing with the wrench. I would have to play it a bunch more to see if its balanced or not, but it definitely felt good to bash my head against it first for a while!
I've managed to beat it without Wrench. But it was with Aquifer. Both of them are probably the best "one ofs" you can have in the deck.
Aquifer helps in the early game and keeps you going in the late game.
Wrench doesn't do a lot in the early game, but is completely explosive in the late game.
Wow, this is a great game! Very tricky as I tend to get too greedy and end up barely missing the score requirements. A bit of an addicting game as well haha. Great work!
haaa this game is so fking hard, so many cards feel like trap when u buy it.
so far I manage to go more then half then death.
DAYS. it took DAYS BUT I DID IT! Goldmines, walkie-talkies, and minecarts for DAYS! Absolutely amazing game!
Lesgoooooo!!!!!
My strat was to get walkie-talkie at the start and get as many resource cards as possible (preferably scorium). Then all I had to do was balance the ratio of resource cards, "card generating cards" (gloves and minecarts are a must buy, and campfire is really good to have too), a few energy-generating cards and some a few gold-mines.
Ideally you should always have some card-generating card in your starting hand each turn, which increases the chance of hitting other card-generating cards, energy cards and especially gold mines.
Also any 0 energy cost cards with +1 card in them (ingots and helmets) are a must-buy because they're free resources with 0 downside.
Doing this should make things snowball late-game where you can get 50+ scorium per gold-mine and can chain tons of energy and card-generating cards together.
I love retromine, it's one of the games I come back to play over and over. It does feel like there are only a few viable deckbuilds that can win the game, notably with draw (esp. free), and Gold Mine/Wrench.
I ran into a weird bug while drawing my whole deck that made these placeholder cards that got frozen in the background and couldn't be played. They only lasted that round but interfered with drawing cards or sometimes got drawn out of the deck after a shuffle.
Hi everyone! Developer here -
Thank you so much for your overwhelming support! I've read every comment, review, community discord post, email, everything. I have heard all of your feedback, good and bad, am just floored and humbled by it all.
Retromine has not been in active development since late 2024, but due to the overwhelming support, I am weighing my options and figuring out how I can continue development on the game, whether that be finding a publisher, or releasing the game on Steam using my own free time and paying out of my own pocket.
I am also considering more free updates for the game, please leave ideas for future content in the replies to this comment!
You can read more in the community devlog post above.
Thanks and keep mining <3
CCDG
Keep up the great work! I've been enjoying this one since release and definitely feel the core game is great and it might be a few updates away from *perfection*. Cheers!
Might've gotten a surge of players because Itch posted your game on social media!
https://bsky.app/profile/itch.io/post/3ltm7iz3k322o
https://x.com/itchio/status/1943354536384483493
It's definitely where I found out about the game.
So I may have played Dominion
I saw Minecart and Furnace, I saw the line.
Deck:
Early Game: Prospect as much as I could, till I got an Aquifer and a Furnace. Goodbye Prospect. Then I was building what parts of the engine I could. Minecart's an auto buy. Bat Cavern helps thin the deck for other draw cards to find action. Campsite and Salamander helped out in res heavy hands. A few 0 en, Draw 1 card (cantrips) when there was nothing else. They don't harm nor benefit the consistency of a deck, but they help out in the early game.
Mid Game: Aquifers are cool, but getting a Wrench means as long as I don't whiff every round, I am guaranteed to win. So now I have two payoffs to my engine. Ore is flooding in.
Late Game: Buying nothing but Minecart, Ingot, Helmet, and Isopod at this point. The more cantrips, the bigger Wrench gets. Added another Aquifer and Wrench later into the run to make number go up.
Wrench is too OP
Finally got it after many tries. I tried to win by considering all the cards and building synergies but truthfully it's just too difficult to get further than level 9 with that.
My strategy for winning was to get a Walky Talkies in the early game and then hard commit on getting Gold Mines and building up my ore and score collection and pretty much nothing else.
Very good job, I can see you're actively working on it and I'm excited to come back a little later when it's more balanced.
Aquafer and any 0 cost that draws cards, win.
Addictive game! My only issue with it is how RNG dependent it felt. A lot of cards feel completely unviable past the 6th or so level and the scaling ramps up so fast that it feels like i basically have to get lucky and get enough of the cards I want/need to show up in the store.
There should be a way to cancel a card that got just played. I have lost many runs, just because of a misclick.
I keep losing at level 9! I’m convinced Cirno has cursed me!
fun stuff, keep the good work!
I have played 1min and bought it to play more :3
Hello, this is a great game, very enjoyable mechanics and difficulty. However I bugged out with a wrench build playing a lot of actions.
My cards are replaced by "card", and the screen froze, game is locked, I had to abandon the run.
Hypothesis for replication: may have been caused by the action card that puts discard pile into your drawing pile.
gold mine doesn't work as intended/how it reads, gave me 13 of a chosen resource when I had 13 in my deck, not 39... Either way...
Very fun, really easy to get addicted. My biggest complaint is the cost for removing cards from your deck has to be lower. It's so hard to effectively deckbuild with the current set up.
3 possible type of decks I guess
Fourth try victory. Minecarts + Mineshaft spam with a lot of additional energy and draw. Score using a few "the creature" and one improved scorium.
it's really easy to misclick when a card wants you to select another card... i'm two days and many runs in, it's still happening a lot, it kills runs. just increasing the visual distinction of a currently selected card should help
phenomenal game by the way
Won with 0 rerolls (and the lowest "tools played" posted so far, although someone could get 0 if they tried of course).
Now that I know the final goal is 300 in 6 turns I can play tighter in the future
0 tools used would be incredibly difficult. you'd have to hope for an aquifer on your first shop just to be able to scale without prospect
ok then i'll do it
seems like Escape Rope should read 3 OTHER actions, for clarity
Gameplay and a touch of critique ;)
First Victory and apparently one of the larger decks. Thanks to the gold mines. Took me quite a few attempts to finish it.
Finally beat it. And yeah, the game feels waaaaaay too RNG. There being no re-rolls or locks for anything at all, means you're literally just praying for good shop rng. If you don't get it, well you lose. If you get it and get a single bad draw in an encounter? You lose. Basically even if you know what you need to do, you're just stuck doing it over and over until you get average or above RNG. Since a single bad turn in a single encounter just instantly kills your run with 0 counter play.
The difference between good and bad cards is just so massive that you can't really use fallback strategies to keep yourself alive until you hit what you actually want, either. Also deck thinning is obscenely expensive so you can't help consistency that way, leaving even fewer options.
A lot of cards feel like they are meant to be part of some combo. But the game is so short in terms of level, with such a steep scaling. That you can't actually ever make those builds. Because you'd just die while assembling them, before hitting critical mass.
There are a lot of options presented, but they are almost all wrong. Leading to a very "illusion of choice" kind of feeling. Where if you try anything even remotely creative or interesting. The game will just instantly kill you. Building like you're a miracle rogue in HS is pretty much what you have to do. And you better pray you luck into the key cards very early. Or you're dead regardless.
The game is good enough that I'm annoyed at its shortcomings. Which is praise in itself, in a way. If the game was bad. I just wouldn't care. But it's got a lot of potential. It just isn't there yet. I hope you do get it where it needs to go though, truly.
Thank you for putting this into words. It pretty well captures what I was feeling, except that I couldn't express it any better than "this seems too hard".
I disagree, I'm pretty sure you can 100% winrate if you play properly
I don't doubt it. But how many of the cards would you actually ever use? And how many would you never ever use, since they are bait? That's kind of the root issue. If there is only 1-2 "proper" ways to do it, and everything else is bait. Then we get back to the "illusion of choice" conundrum. That is my core concern for replayability.
definitely agree on that
Yeah, most cards are just outright bad. Then some have the illusion of being good, but are actually bad. And then there's Minecart. If you have any amount of payoff already in your deck (Aquafer, Wrench), then Minecart is singlehandedly the best purchase you can ever make going forward.
For instance... Smeltery. 2 Energy for 1, has to be good right? Well, if you consider cards and energy both a resource, then this is net 0 (-1 card +1 energy), with no other effects. So you essentially wasted your ore buying it. Furnace on the other hand, 2 Energy for 4 Energy. This is a net +1 (-1 card, +2 energy), and is crucial for building a "Draw your deck every round" engine.
Other net 0 cards are fine. Like Ingot (+2 ore), Helmet (+2 score) and isopod (shuffle discard into draw). They don't harm your deck (0 cost, play a card, draw a card), give a small little benefit, and also contribute towards Wrench (great payoff card for engine decks)
But then you got cards like the anvil or whatever. +4 resource and +1 cost? Even for the "play a resource" cards like brush and glove, there's still better options than that.
There's some "okay" early game cards that haven't ever caused me a run failure like Campsite, Bat Cavern, and Salamander, but things like Furnace and Minecart are better than them.
I don't even remember a majority of the cards because playing a card to get some ore or score while doing nothing else didn't need to be an action card, because we already have resource cards. The +1/+1 cards that only work if you have no resources seem bad, because you just always want resources to play during a round. Would be better if they cost 0, because then you could at least use them after playing all your resources. But again, other options are just outright better for that.
hi everyone, new minor update out today! it includes a new card by guest artist blazyo, some squashed bugs, and some minor balance changes.
the big announcement is a new community discord! join today!
https://discord.gg/zwquRzpQNY
I love the base concept, and I'm excited to watch the development of this game, but I have a few concerns that I hope will be addressed in the final product:
1) The difficulty - I think it's excellent that this game is so simple, but manages to be so tough. That said, the dramatic increase in Score required to beat the later levels means that there are very few strategies that actually stand a chance of winning and there are many *many* cards in the shop that are simply a trap.
In most deck-builders that I've played, the base difficulty is approachable with a variety of strategies and allows the player to experiment with building their deck, while there will tend to be higher difficulty modes (like ascensions in Slay the Spire) that require the player to plan out their strategy more carefully.
2) The pointless cards - This is an extension of the first concern, which is that there are many cards currently in the game that do not justify their inclusion in your deck (Ex. Smeltery is just a worse Fruit Bat, Anvil has far too much opportunity cost for the effect it produces). I'd love to see some synergy for animal cards or Tools, but as it stands now there is little reason to play anything other than the most efficient card draw (Minecart, Helmet, Ingot) and big Resource cards. Everything else only dilutes your chances of drawing the cards that actively win you the game.
3) The map - This is definitely personal preference, and not something that would make or break the overall game, but I feel that the map should be more than just flavor. If there were branching paths, that could alleviate some of the difficulty concern. Additionally, I think it would be interesting if the cards offered in the shop were influenced by the region (Ex: more animals for sale in the Buried Forest, or more Tools for sale in the Magic City, etc.)
I want to reiterate that I think this game is awesome, and none of these issues have dampened my enthusiasm to see where this game goes. I'll be following this one closely. 😁
Awesome game. Took quite some time to get to this point but grinding ressources only to stack them up with Gold mines finally got me through to the end. Really hyped for the continuation of this project. Congrats on making such a great game!
wow this is so well build. great job!
Game is so much fun
Is there any way to contact you on private?
Incredibly fun! First victory:
amazing game 9/10
quick question, are you still working on the game? (no judgement ofc. totally understand) anyway, this game is great! i have 9 hours in it and still haven't finished it! its not to hard, and addicting! you should AT THE LEAST, try it! thank you :D
thanks for playing, i am still working on the game! huge update out later this year so check back <3
yay! Thank you! Can’t wait!
Your game really inspired me to make my own and I appreciate that greatly! also good job on your gameplay loop you really nailed it
Thank you
<3
Is there anywhere I can download the song this game uses? I'm working on a video about it and it would be great as background.
Also, I'm absolutely in love with this game, definitely one of the best deckbuilders I've played.
the music is by cynicmusic on opengameart.org!
Still loving the small radar deck. Hoping for a game expansion with endless mode or harder levels. Thanks for the great game.
Fun but a lot of card feel like they do nothing card and Never seem to be drawn with synergies even when you got 5+ of them and removed 2 ores.A lot of cards have more UNsynergies and begining feels too tight where you basically get a amazing run and get shorted 1 score and die level 2 or get perfect score but no ore and no cards that help you survive. Some passive upgrades could probably help some what especially with synergies.
A few notes for possible future updates:
I think that the issue of creating the "placeholder" cards is when you are clicking through draw cards and your library hits zero before the discard pile gets shuffled back. They can get stuck in place weirdly and make it impossible to proceed.
On balancing, I think that the walkie-talkie, gold mine, and wrench strategies are too easy versus the various upgrading strategies. Especially, I'd like to see the anvil get a boost - I've tried to force it many times but have never been able to have all the pieces line up.
It would be really cool, if there was a way harder endless mode with bosses, where you could save some of your deck between runs.
Basically you would earn gold in-game, and there would be a shop in the main menu where you can buy packs of card to add to your starting deck. Then have stuff like radar or gold mine be extremely rare.
Really enjoyed this game, wish there was more to it so i could play it for hundreds of hours
This is one of my favorite games on itch.io, had such a pleasure playing this! Beat it using only "gold mine" card and buying a bunch of more resource cards from shop. Towards the end, I was getting like 3-400 ores every round, and could just reroll the shop until i got more gold mines.
I would love to see more levels, or perhaps an endless mode, where it just keeps increasing. Perhaps, you could make it so every 5 levels is a boss, or something, where you could earn powerups or something more useful.
For balancing reasons, if you decide to make more levels, I would love to have more turns in a level at later stages - when the deck gets too big, you aren't getting through most of the deck in the few turns we have. Also, a way to start a turn with more than 3 energy would be nice (maybe that could be one of the powerups in endless mode)
Anyway, tysm for this game, it was a blast!!
My second complete run! This time with a shuffle deck + shovels.
