Loosely based on reporting by the journalistic organisation 'istories', 'Care for a Card?' puts the player in the shoes of a Russian recruiter using the Unified Military Registry to find the perfect recruits for Putin's war in Ukraine.


Our game intends to shine a light on how the Russian Federation under its current authoritarian government treats its civilians as resources to be spent in exchange for Ukrainian blood and soil, rather than lives to be cherished and protected.


Please note: The Windows build is the intended experience and may offer more stability if you are having issues with the browser version.


Other than the names and likenesses of prominent political figures inside and outside of Russia, any other resemblances between the fictional characters in our game and real life citizens of Russia is entirely coincidental and does not represent the intention of the game developers.


As with any game jam project, there remains a long list of "would like to do's" and "what ifs". Our intention was to distill the cynicism of a state that neglects to treat its civilians as people into the gameplay loop. Fundamentally, we are happy with how this has worked out. However, we would have liked to force the player to engage more deeply with the 'humanity' of the people they are sending off to war. Hence, our vision for an extended project would include integrating civilian interaction further into the core gameplay loop. This alongside deepening the strategic options available to the player, which would then force the player to choose between purposefully ignoring the impact their choices have on civilians and reaping the tactical bonuses they can otherwise achieve.


Feedback from players is most welcome and greatly appreciated!



  • Cards are 'played' by dragging them from your hand onto the hanging hook in the upper centre of the screen.
  • 'Person cards' can be stored by right-clicking them when they are in your hand. The border will go green to indicate they are being stored. Right-clicking a stored card will then remove the card from storage.
  • Locked cards can be unlocked by storing them for a certain number of turns.
  • You can switch between your 'person card' hand and your 'power card' hand by clicking on the deck of cards on the tray in the lower left corner of the screen.
  • You gain one power card at the end of every round.
  • You can discard power cards by right-clicking on them at any time.

This game was developed part-time in one month for the Floodlight Investigative Jam 2026 and is the work of three developers. Aside from a small collection of legally obtained textures and the Godot game engine, all assets and scripts were created by the developers. No generative AI was used in the creation of this project.


Cale Adamson

Audio Engineer


Leto du Plessis

Programmer and Lead Developer


Kairan Moorlach

Artist

Download

Download
cfac_windows.zip 122 MB

Comments

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Interesting game, congrats!
I played in the "intended" mode, but it was very hard: most of times I had 2 locked cards over 5, so no much choice... and usually I lost.

Hi! Thanks so much for trying our game and for the feedback. It's greatly appreciated. We're looking forward to trying the other submissions, including yours, and will definitely leave feedback when we do!

The difficulty is somewhat intentional. The idea was to encourage players to think several rounds ahead. The game is designed so that it's very feasible to lose two or three rounds in a row, and then make it all back with a very good round later by stockpiling power cards and strong civilian cards. That's why we went with a multiplier approach - and also the reason we added in locked cards at all. Played this way, "intended" difficulty is very winnable, albeit quite slow to do so.

The idea was to try and capture some of the attritional nature of the war. In the real battle for Chasiv Yar, this back-and-forth exchange of land (at very high human cost) was quite common.

However, I think this strategy is fairly difficult to come up with alone, and I think we definitely need to provide an interactive tutorial to try and explain this a bit better. You could probably tell by the rough in game tutorial that this was rather rushed! 

Thanks again for giving our game a go!