See What the Fight Looks Like
A roguelike deckbuilder built around a single twist: you build your deck during every fight, drafting from a personal market you've been shaping all run.
Most deckbuilders give you a deck and let you tweak it between battles. Contested Space is different. The thing you're growing across a run is your market, not your deck. The deck is what you assemble out of the market in combat every turn.
Between battles you add cards to your market, upgrade the cards already in it, and reshape what your future hands could look like. When combat begins, you draft from your market in real time, cards rotate through it every turn, forcing a constant trade-off: spend now for firepower, or invest in something that'll matter three turns from now.
Every fight is a deckbuilding exercise. You're not playing a finished deck against an encounter, you're racing to build the right deck for that encounter, out of the market you've spent the run shaping.
The market is yours. The deck is built mid-fight. The stations change everything.
When combat begins, you start drafting from your market in real time. Cards rotate through every turn, forcing a constant trade-off: spend now for firepower, or invest in something that pays off three turns from now.
Deploy stations in front-row and back-row slots, three per side. They attack on their own and grant ongoing bonuses every turn, a second axis of decision-making running parallel to your deck draft.
Designed solo first. Online co-op (2-4 players) builds on that foundation. Each player runs their own market, drafts their own cards, deploys their own stations. Co-op multiplies the experience instead of diluting it.
Dozens of relics across four rarity tiers reshape your strategy on the fly. Each one is a run-defining artifact that changes how you draft, deploy, and fight.
Each tier introduces new modifiers and threats, not just bigger numbers. Culminates in a back-to-back boss finale. Designed for hundreds of hours of mastery.
Handcrafted and procedural paths through each sector. Random encounters, hidden events, elite enemies, unique bosses, and seeded runs for sharing challenges with friends and streamers.
Habitable worlds are the rarest resource in the galaxy. As civilization pushed outward, every system with a planet in the goldilocks zone was claimed, settled, and fortified generations ago. Species and factions that once competed alone consolidated into vast alliances to survive, and for a time the borders held.
Then the populations exploded. Fortress systems that took centuries to build cannot be taken by force, so there is only one way left to grow: find new worlds first and hold them. Newly discovered planets have become flashpoints, and the alliances now meet in open combat over every confirmed discovery.
Now a rumor is spreading through every alliance at once. A single uncharted system containing not one but multiple habitable planets. Your alliance has tasked your faction with investigating the rumors and claiming, by force if necessary, every world worth holding.
You arrive to find the rumors were true, and that you were not the first to hear them. The system's sectors are rife with warring ships. Rival alliance fleets contest every approach. Rebels hide in the system's shadows, some of them flying your own alliance's colors. And threading between the battle lines, traders skirt the fighting, lining their pockets off everyone's war.
Each faction has a distinct mechanical identity, its own card frame, and its own color palette. The deepest builds usually live at the seams between two factions, not inside one.
Humanity, long after leaving Earth behind: an alliance of trade, science, and military power bound together by necessity rather than affection. Economy, biotech, and military pressure expressed through clean synergies and strong scaling.
An insectoid civilization that rose from a single teeming homeworld and never stopped multiplying, its castes dividing trade, science, and war the way a hive divides labor. Swarms, mind control, and attrition that punish opponents who don't adapt fast enough.
Handcrafted pixel art rendered at a crisp 640x360. Animated stations, parallax starfields, and faction-specific palettes that make each alliance instantly readable on screen.
Software engineer with a Master's from Georgia Tech. Shortly after diving into Slay the Spire 2, James picked up Star Realms for the first time, and immediately needed a game that combined both. When that game didn't exist, he started building it.
Contested Space is the result: a co-op roguelike deckbuilder that merges the tactical depth of StS-style runs with the head-to-head card combat and station warfare of Star Realms. Every system is designed, coded, and shipped by one person.
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