Shopska Salad

In Shopska Salad, you inherit your grandmother’s farmhouse in the Bulgarian countryside and must complete a ritual: keep the Shopska salad on the kitchen table fresh for seven nights while monsters try to reach it. You prepare the house by day, then defend it after ringing the bell. If a monster gets to the salad, it keeps eating until you stop it; if the salad is gone, the ritual fails.

Prepare the house

Daylight is short. You buy traps from Kukeri’s stall and place them along forest paths and ravines, then use a hammer and planks to mend the fences, doors and windows. The monsters’ routes are marked during the day, helping you arrange traps so one can feed into another: a spring plank can launch a monster into a wolf pit, while pitch can slow a wave before it catches fire.

Defend the salad

Traps attack monsters on the paths, while you cover the gaps with a shotgun. You bunny-hop across the yard and return to the kitchen if anything reaches the table. As the nights pass, new traps become available at Kukeri’s stall, and new monsters force you to adjust your plan.

Grow stronger

Each survived night earns leva. Whenever you gain a level, three ingredients appear beside the salad; adding one grants its perk.

Change each winter

From your second run onward, each winter is dealt from a seed that determines the land, which monsters appear each night and which traps Kukeri carries. Before the first bell, you can take an heirloom from your grandmother’s shelf. You earn heirlooms by completing feats in earlier runs, such as killing the Lamya, and each has a cost. The pruning knife provides a wine press that you can place on any path, but makes traps more expensive. Grandmother’s sieve provides a free flour sack each dawn, but Kukeri stops selling harrows.

Some winters begin with snow already covering the yard and the land beyond the fence, and the streams frozen over. These winters also bring a greater chance of a blizzard. In later winters, Kukeri may warn you at dawn that one is coming. When the bell rings, fog obscures the distant paths and heavy snow falls; monsters emerge from the white close to the house. You can prepare by building near the yard, and Kukeri sells some close-range traps at a lower price that day.

Weekly village challenge

Each week, everyone defends the same named village. Your score depends on how many nights you survive and how fresh the salad stays. Each retry costs some freshness, and only your best attempt counts. A notice board by the yard gate shows how your friends did. Heirlooms, jars and masks stay at home, so everyone starts on equal terms.

Play with friends

You can play solo or online with up to three friends. Experience is shared, but each player chooses their own ingredients, allowing you to divide tasks between setting traps and using the shotgun.