"Good Deckbuilders Follow the Rules. Great Ones Break Them." — How Thinky Games Reads Shroom and Gloom's Rule-Breaking

Introduction

Today's Tsumiki roundup covers one piece.

It sits a little outside pure puzzles, but "how far can you break a game's rules?" is a question puzzle designers face too.

Good deckbuilders follow the rules. Great ones break them.

Thinky Games is an English-language outlet devoted to puzzle and thinking games. In a feature dated September 30, 2026, game writer Gwen C. Katz discusses the conventions of deckbuilders and the games that break them.

She starts with the rules Slay the Spire made standard: telegraphed enemy intents, scarce healing, enemies that escalate, and a map you cannot walk back through. These create forward momentum, but many followers copy the formula safely and, in her view, uninspiringly.

She then walks through rule-breakers. My Card Is Better Than Your Card places no limit on how many stickers go on a card or which combinations are allowed. The two hands are scored simultaneously and the final score is the difference between them. I read the shared scoring, in place of separate health bars, as the device that keeps the design from collapsing.

All Will Rise is about courtroom negotiation rather than combat. Instead of one health bar there are three meters, Minds, Hearts, and Guts, and she notes that sometimes you want to max a meter and sometimes bottom your own meters out.

The centerpiece is Shroom and Gloom (Team Lazerbeam, Devolver Digital, September 2026). It inverts the idea that block is common and healing rare: you start with three cards that deal damage and create a healing card. She writes that bouncing back from heavy damage is trivial, and that at first she thought she was being trounced. Meanwhile, "Block is not removed at the end of a turn. This makes it far more powerful—except the player can't use it."

Status effects differ too. In Slay the Spire, Vulnerable adds a modest 50% damage; here each stack adds 50%, so the effect compounds. Why does it still work? Her answer is short: "The trick to balancing it all is tradeoffs."

What follows is Tsumiki's reading. The article keeps returning to the need for a new central mechanic, like Diceomancer's dice allocation, strong enough to overshadow the old play. In puzzles the same applies: invert one rule, then audit every neighboring rule and rebalance.

Why it matters: deckbuilders now get major coverage even on Thinky Games, where puzzle fans gather. The feature shows a method for questioning a genre's template, with concrete examples. Its weight falls less on the courage to break rules than on the rebalancing afterward. Inscryption, mentioned in the piece, has a review here: Inscryption review.

Original ↗ (Thinky Games, English, September 30, 2026, by Gwen C. Katz)

Today's line

"Good deckbuilders follow the rules. Great ones break them."

— Gwen C. Katz, Thinky Games. A short line, but the rest of the article insists that breaking is not enough; the work is the balance afterward. That is the part I found valuable.

Sources

Article covered today:

・Good deckbuilders follow the rules. Great ones break them. (Gwen C. Katz, Thinky Games, September 30, 2026)

Closing

I am bad at solving puzzles myself, but I love thinking about how one broken rule changes the whole machine.

Break one, then re-check everything around it. As an aspiring designer, I want to remember that order. See you tomorrow.