Fogpiercer

Fogpiercer wants you to think three turns ahead, then punishes you anyway

The pitch sounds simple. A train, a wall of fog, and bandit convoys that always outnumber you. Then you sit down with Fogpiercer, start counting action points, and the deckbuilder skin peels back to reveal a positional puzzle wearing roguelike armor.

Mad Cookies Studio built this around one idea most card games treat as an afterthought. The battlefield is a weapon. You don't just play cards at enemies. You shove them into each other, off cliffs, onto the tracks in front of your own wheels so you can flatten them next turn. Chain reactions aren't a bonus. They're the whole thing.

It's out on Steam with a listed release of July 17, 2026, on PC and Xbox.

The combat math is nastier than it looks

Here's the loop. You assemble a train. Locomotive, carriages, driver, and every piece you bolt on injects a specific set of cards into your starting deck. So the deck isn't some abstract thing you draft in a vacuum. It's physically your train. Sell a carriage, lose those cards. Bolt on a crane car, and now you can reposition enemy vehicles across the board.

That's the interesting part, welding the hardware to the deck. Most roguelike deckbuilders keep "what you own" and "what you play" as two separate systems. This one fuses them.

Over 170 cards, per the studio's count, and the descriptions lean on interaction instead of raw stat sticks. A minigun sprays wide for cleanup. Artillery knocks a lead vehicle backward so it crashes into whatever's trailing it. Coal shuffles positioning. Hacker cards deploy decoys or just seize control of an enemy car and turn it on its friends. Enemies telegraph their moves, so a good turn is really an order-of-operations problem. What do I trigger first so the dominoes fall the right way?

Limited action points are the pressure valve. You never have enough, which is the point. That single constraint pushes you off "play everything" and toward finding the one sequence that does five things at once.

What the early videos are testing

The creator coverage tells you where this game lives. It's not pulling the flashy cinematic crowd. It's landing with the strategy and roguelike-deckbuilder people, the ones who'll happily spend twenty minutes of video overthinking a single fight.

A few things keep coming up. Difficulty gets flagged early. One first-look creator basically opened with "this is kinda tough," which tracks with a game designed around being outnumbered. There's the survival-management framing, the last-train-on-earth-in-the-frozen-apocalypse angle that gives the tactics an actual stake. And then the "is this worth your money" review format, which this genre attracts because the buyers are cautious and comparison-heavy. They own Slay the Spire. They own Monster Train. They want to know what this does differently before they hand over the cash.

Based on what's shown, the answer is the environmental manipulation. That's the differentiator. Whether it holds up across a full run, or gets solved into a handful of dominant combos, is the thing no launch-week review can promise yet. Honestly, that's the part I'd watch for.

A studio with a strange back catalog

Worth a glance at who's making this. Mad Cookies Studio's own site doesn't even lead with Fogpiercer. It leads with Mad Productivity, a desktop to-do and time-tracking app whose whole hook is that it won't nag you for procrastinating. Notes, reminders, time tracking, and a stated philosophy that doing nothing is a normal part of working. Copyright notice reads 2021.

So it's a small outfit shipping productivity software and turn-based tactics under one roof. Not unusual for indies. But it tells you Fogpiercer isn't riding a big publishing machine, and that shapes how it reaches players.

The road out of the fog

The run structure is region-to-region, branching nodes inside each region, and you pick your path by weighing modifiers against rewards. Battlefields vary. One hands you an ally. Another cramps your dodging room. Another parks you next to a cliff edge you can weaponize. Chop shops and depots let you repair, upgrade, buy, and sell carriages, which loops straight back into deck modification. Bosses cap each region with named characters and their own kits.

Familiar skeleton, the map-crawl every roguelike uses now. But the carriage economy gives those node choices real weight, because a single depot visit can rewrite your deck's identity.

A tactical roguelike deckbuilder launching into 2026 walks into one of the most saturated corners of PC gaming. A broad spray-and-pray marketing push would torch budget on people who'll never care, because the folks who actually buy these games don't respond to reach. They respond to demonstration. They want to watch someone build a broken chain-reaction combo and think "I could do that better." So the sensible play for a studio this size is going narrow: the strategy-and-roguelike YouTube reviewers, the deckbuilder theorycrafters, the survival-management long-play streamers, the exact creator profiles already circling the game. CreatorFetch is the kind of tool a small studio uses to run that play, mapping the niche creators whose audiences already own the competitors, instead of shouting into the launch-day firehose and hoping.

The bet is legibility. Fogpiercer's best moments, an artillery shot that turns one enemy into a wrecking ball against three others, read instantly on video and pretty much sell themselves. If the mid-run balance holds and the 170-card pool doesn't collapse into two winning strategies, this has a real shot with people who already love the genre. Just don't expect it to hold your hand. The fog isn't interested in fair fights.