Slots & Skulls

Slots & Skulls is a turn-based roguelite where your weapon is a slot machine. You build the pool of symbols it can land on, then stop its wheels one at a time; the results determine what happens during each turn. Blades, spells, poisons, thorns and gold engines are among the symbols you can use.

Build your symbol pool

The game has 112 symbols, each with its own effect. Common symbols drop easily from kills, while bosses drop legendary ones. Some symbols strengthen the one beside them, spend your health, damage enemies or earn gold; others trigger quick-fingered skill checks.

After each fight, you can shop for symbols and power-ups, reroll the stock, lock a symbol you cannot yet afford so it appears in the next shop, or remove an unwanted symbol from your pool. The shop chart shows how each purchase affects your attack, defense, gold, pool size and kill speed. You can also activate four power-ups from the d-pad, while up to eight passive power-ups help prepare you for difficult fights.

Fights and progression

A run has 10 levels with five fights each, featuring 33 pixel-drawn enemies. Each enemy calls for a different strategy: physical attacks do not affect armored enemies, archers can stun you and cost you your next turn, ice mages can freeze a wheel, and burn damage drains your health in real time. Thieves can take gold from your purse during a fight, and some fights pit you against multiple enemies.

After clearing a level, you move straight to the next with everything you own. You can replay completed levels at higher difficulty modes for more symbols, skulls or gems; higher difficulties also bring tougher enemies. Each fight you win pays skulls, which you keep even if you die.

Chests and the forge

You have a chance to win a chest after every fight. Depending on its quality, it can contain common, rare or epic symbols, or gems for upgrade attempts. At the forge, you can upgrade symbols from +0 to +10, increasing all their stats. The higher a symbol's level, the lower the chance of a successful upgrade; a failed attempt destroys it.

Gems can change the risks of upgrading: green gems slightly improve the chance of success, blue gems protect a symbol from destruction but lower it by one level on a failure, and extremely rare yellow gems guarantee an upgrade. You can smelt spare symbols back into skulls. Skulls can also be spent on forge upgrades, run-long modifiers, adopting cats and activating their pacts, or abilities.

Cats, abilities and modifiers

Before each run, you can adopt a cat with skulls and bring it along. Every cat has a pact that lasts for the run, combining an advantage with a disadvantage. For example, one cat pays interest after each fight based on your gold, while giving every enemy a chance to steal some. The selected cat stays by the fight stage and keeps you company.

You can also choose one of six abilities before a run. Each ability can be used once per fight: one can spin a wheel again, while another lets you skip a turn and double the effect of every symbol that lands on the next turn. The game also has 21 modifiers that you activate with skulls, including more health, more damage, a chance to take one final move when you die and two extra slot-machine wheels.

Multiplayer

You can invite a friend from your Steam list to a 1v1 match. Each match starts with a draft in which you take turns choosing three symbols; any symbol one player picks is unavailable to the other. You then fight the same enemies on separate screens, buying symbols from the shop after each fight, before facing your friend as the boss.

After four fights, you duel. The anvil then opens, letting you upgrade symbols to strengthen your build, though an upgrade can destroy the symbol you risk. The first player to win the set number of rounds takes the match. DUEL ONLY mode skips the enemy fights.

Auto modes

In a fight, the machine spins, landed symbols attack automatically, and the enemy strikes back until one side falls. Auto Mode stops the reels for you, leaving you to handle skill checks; Auto 2X Mode runs everything twice as fast. Your choices between fights include which symbols to keep, how far to upgrade them, which cats to adopt and which modifiers to activate.

Endless Mode also has Full Auto Mode, which lets your build fight without any interaction.