PICOhaven is a tactical card-based dungeon crawler / light solo RPG for PICO-8, inspired by the board game Gloomhaven. It adopts a modified & simplified version of the mechanics used in that game, to fit within constraints of the PICO-8 environment (code size, resolution, etc), and to streamline solo play.
The story includes 16 playable scenarios (some are optional side quests), 8 levels of ability upgrade choices, and multiple items that also affect gameplay.
Note: This is just a free, solo-fan-made project and has no affiliation with Gloomhaven. If you like this type of game I recommend checking out Gloomhaven (and its official video game adaptation) for a game with a lot of tactical depth from multi-character cooperative play!
Play PICOhaven here: (desktop or mobile)
Quick Gameplay Overview
(for those who like to jump straight in and figure it out as you go)
- Use the arrow keys and the 🅾️ button ('Z' if using a keyboard) to explore, select cards, and fight.
- The other button occasionally used is ❎ ('X' on a keyboard) to cancel/undo.
- Defeat all enemies to advance the story and unlock new scenarios, as well as upgrades to your ability and modifier decks.
- You are 'exhausted' and fail a scenario if you take too much damage, or if your deck runs out of cards (each time you've played all the cards in your deck you reshuffle them, but a random card is 'burned' and not available for the rest of the scenario).
- If you would take fatal damage but have cards in hand, you will instead 'burn' a random card to block the damage, but beware: this shrinks your deck so you'll have limited turns left to win the scenario before becoming exhausted.
- The game should automatically save your progress after each scenario, success or failure, allowing you to come back to it later on the same device (you can retry the same scenario multiple times and earn XP even on failure).
- If you're not sure what happened in combat because a lot of text scrolled by quickly, at the end of any round you can press ❎ to scroll back through the message log.
- Let me know what you think, and if you run into any issues or questions...
How-To-Play, with screenshots
More Details on How-To-Play
Strategy Tips (minor spoilers)
Dev Notes


I got some good 1:1 feedback from playtesters and updated the cart to add more 'tutorial' style messages (these disappear after the first few levels to reduce the volume of messages), as well as other UI updates and undo/confirm options in a few key places.
The game is still not fully self-explanatory due to size limits (unless I can free up some more tokens), especially when it comes to some of the later upgrades... so if you play it and find it confusing, I recommend reading the "how to play" and tips hidden behind spoiler tags in the post above or leaving questions here. Have fun!


I've also now uploaded commented-in-more-detail source code to https://github.com/icegoat9/picohaven, including some notes-to-self I put together during development to remember how the different game states connected, what all the sprite flags meant, what global variables I was using, and so on.
This is partly just for myself to remember in the future since this was my first major PICO-8 project and I learned a lot about what workflow works for me, but I figured I might as well make the repo public in case others learning PICO-8 or working on similar types of games find it useful in the future.


Wow, you did a fantastic job on this. It helps that I already know how GloomHaven works; I suspect someone new to it might need some more explanation for the different systems, but what's here is really impressive and captures the feel of the larger game in a way that's streamlined and quick. Well done.


Thanks, @nephilim! Agreed-- the gloomhaven-style "select 2 cards for a turn" + default actions + discarded vs. burned cards concepts are complicated and take some time to grok if you haven't seen them before (and it takes a while to figure out strategy for how to select cards and initiative).
I wasn't able to fit a full tutorial into the game and had to settle for some screenshot-type how-to outside it, so it's not as accessible as it could be. So I'm happy whenever there are even a small number of players who get it and enjoy it!


Well you certainly succeeded with it. I played it all through my lunch hour today, and it was great fun. Indeed, I think I prefer PicoHaven to GloomHaven. Having only one character means no waiting for turns. The maps are nice and small. Plays fast but still feels strategic. No "bookkeeping" to do. Feels zippy. Really enjoying it!


@dw817 there’s not as much tutorial as there should be— when you defeat a monster it drops treasure. But if there’s a door in the room you have to use cards to go to it (the level ends when you defeat all monsters in all rooms). In an earlier version I had the next door flash during the first level as a tip. Also, if you want to pick up treasure along the way you have to end a turn on it.


Maybe some day especially if people are interested :)... I have a new character and loose story sketched out for a Part 2, but I also maxed out token and compressed size limits, so I'd need to take a step back and figure out how to rewrite a chunk of the code or cut some existing features to free up enough space for some new card mechanics.
Maybe rewriting the icon system to use the newer PICO-8 "custom fonts" mode would help, or maybe if I took out all the tutorial style tips/hints and called Part 2 advanced, "play Part 1 first to learn how to play"...


I've released a v1.1. Mostly this is under the hood changes (using PICO-8's newer custom font functionality for the multicolor icons to save tokens, a step toward being ready to write a Chapter 2 in the future), but I also added more tutorial prompts and hints about concepts like "initiative" that were confusing-- these just show up during the first few levels.
It's still a complex game that may benefit from either reading the tutorial text in the post or having some familiarity with gloomhaven, though.
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