The Royal Writ is a medieval roguelike deckbuilder, but it does not play like most of them. Instead of throwing cards at an enemy across a table, you place your troops into one of three lanes and they march forward a step at a time toward the enemy gates. That turns a card game into something closer to a small battlefield you are managing.

The hook is the permadeath rule, and it is a good one. Any card that reaches the enemy base before you have actually won the fight is destroyed permanently and removed from your deck for the rest of the run. So your best unit is also the one most likely to walk itself off the edge of the world. You are constantly deciding who you are willing to lose.

Your army is animals with problems. There is a wounded flamingo, a short-sighted chicken with a bow, and a lizard that survives by dropping its tail. Out in the world you run into a mantis dentist, a goat tactician and a boar who runs a shop and does not want to be there. It is played for dark laughs rather than grimness.

There are two campaigns. The first has you putting down a rebellion in the king's name, across a map of pits and poison swamps. The second introduces gunpowder, so on top of the terrain you are now dodging incoming fire, and the way you build a deck has to change with it. Forty-one achievements sit across the lot.

Save Sloth Studios developed it and Yogscast Games publishes. It first landed on Steam in August 2025 and sits at Very Positive, 80 per cent of 420 reviews overall and 96 per cent of the 29 in the last month, so the console release is arriving with a track record rather than a promise. The Steam version lists at US$14.99 and the console release carries the updates the PC version has picked up since launch. The Xbox version supports Play Anywhere, and the Game Pass day one applies to Ultimate, Premium and PC members.