A game developer by the name of Kyle Arch reached out to me regarding their new game - Grab Your Deck. It’s a “press-your-luck skate deckbuilder” in which you build skateboard tricks from cards. Cards are parts of tricks: they could be a kickflip, a grab, a spin, or an Ollie. Combine them, and your skater performs them as one trick. For example, a kickflip card and a shove-it card will turn into a varial kickflip. You can either keep going from here as your skater wobbles, dishing out new cards, building up your top score without bailing, or don’t risk it and finish your moves early.

There’s a total of 31,556 tricks! The game currently features three different cities to explore, each with their own “boss” that will try to hinder your progress. The inspiration for Grab your Deck, per Kyle’s email, was as follows:

The math is where it started. Skateboarding and its trick library felt like algebra to me, so I built a toy in Godot. Adding cards, ragdoll bails, and progression turned it into a game.

Two particular benefits about this game:

  • it’s built using the open-source Godot Engine
  • it’s available natively on Linux

Grab Your Deck - in-game screenshot

They also mentioned to me it was “made to run well on the Steam Deck”.

Want to give it a shot? It just got released on Steam today. A demo is also available.