Black Jacket is a new, Balatro-style deckbuilder where you gamble for your soul

If you're looking for your next deckbuilding obsession between Balatro, Monster Train 2, and the upcoming Slay the Spire 2, Black Jacket might be just the thing. This new roguelike deckbuilder adapts the fundamentals of blackjack into a twisted gamble for your soul. Trapped in the afterlife, you must outwit the other restless souls in a warped version of the classic card game to earn the coin needed to bribe the ferryman and claim your freedom. Built by Mipumi Games and published by Skystone Games, it's coming soon.

As one of Diablo's co-creators, Skystone Games president David Brevik is certainly familiar with, well, hell. Black Jacket is all about getting out instead of diving deeper in, however, and is more inspired by the best roguelikes than ARPGs. It takes one of the best card games of all time, spices it up with all manner of power cards and deck-altering abilities, and drizzles some absolutely delicious thematic sauce over the top to create a tremendously flavorful, appetizing meal.

Each round is a showdown against another of the underworld's lost souls. The core goal of reaching a total closer to 21 than your opponent without going over remains the same (at least to begin with), but you're able to stack your deck and bend the rules to push the odds in your favor. You'll quickly start to pull in cards that can be used for multiple values, will alter the effects of other spaces on the board, or can interfere with your rival's plans.

Suits give you an initial theme to work with. Spades, for example, are all about messing with the person on the far side of the table. Shuffle destructive and disruptive cards into their deck, or rearrange the top of their draw pile to quite literally force their hand. As you play more, you'll start to recognize the specific strengths, weaknesses, and tricks of each of the other players. Doing so also unravels their stories, delivering a little more of the storytelling that made the likes of Supergiant's Hades so beloved.

Empower your cards with modifiers to cover your back against mischief, or unleash powerful effects such as forcing your opponents to overcommit, demanding that they give you certain cards, or taking a glimpse at your upcoming draws. With your very soul on the line, every single turn of a card becomes a high-stakes moment.

Much like Balatro before it, Mipumi Games says "Black Jacket is about more than luck. It's about learning to control chaos, outsmart your rivals, and find meaning in their stories. We wanted to create a deckbuilder that feels both familiar and completely new, where blackjack becomes the foundation for endless creative strategies."

"If you really enjoy blackjack, I think this will really resonate with you," Brevik tells PCGamesN. "It really becomes this fun puzzle to solve, with ways you can manipulate the cards and the board and things like that. And then to have this overall dark theming, which is right up my alley, is kind of the bow on the gift."

Black Jacket is set to launch in 2026. Wishlist it now if you want to stay up to date; we'll be sure to bring you more details as they come, because it's certainly looking like one to watch.

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