LADDER
press contact: ladder@yazfab.com
A corporate roguelike deckbuilder set in the tech world of 2026, where every engineer works beside AI agents and "just use Claude" is both a solution and a curse. You don't always kill the boss. Sometimes you fill a meter, because that's how work actually resolves.
Fact sheet
| Developer | Yazfab (solo developer + a fleet of AI agents, which is also what the game is about) |
| Game | LADDER - roguelike deckbuilder, single player, portrait, one-handed |
| Platforms | iOS and Android |
| Release | iOS: August 12, 2026 - live on the App Store, free. Android: August 25, 2026 - live on Google Play, free. |
| Model | Free base game (the Engineer's early career; one unlock extends the climb). Engineering Manager and Product Manager ship as paid DLC with a free first tier; the CEO is a premium unlock with no free tier. No ads, no gacha, no energy timers. |
| Run structure | A run is one fiscal year. A sprint is a quarter, five to thirteen encounters long. The Engineer plays four sprints a year, everyone else two, then the boss. Resumable at any point, down to a single encounter. |
| Website | laddergame.ai |
| Dev log | How LADDER was built |
| Stores | App Store · Google Play |
| Contact | ladder@yazfab.com |
The pitch
Four playable characters - Engineer, Engineering Manager, Product Manager, CEO - work at the same unnamed company during the same fiscal year. An enemy in one campaign is the player in another. Each character is a structurally different game: different win condition, different deck, different way the job breaks you.
The satire lives in the rules, not the flavor text: AI-leveraged cards genuinely are faster and genuinely do leave Tech Debt and Context Rot behind. Some enemies have hit points; the worst ones (Scope Creep, the Skip-Level) can only be resolved, the way work actually resolves.
The game ships with an AI companion - Bit for the Engineer, with counterparts for each character - that reads the run and coaches without ever playing for you. Its replies are metered in Cognits, the same AI-credit currency the fictional employer rations. The satire is load-bearing.
Art
Ten in-game screenshots at App Store resolution, the app icon and five character marks, key art, five vertical motion trailers (the overview and one per character, about 20 seconds each, built from the game's own cards and art), and a fact sheet. The images below are the same assets if you only need one: right-click to save. Illustrations are AI-generated, by design and with disclosure - the game is about working beside these tools.
Boilerplate
LADDER is a corporate roguelike deckbuilder for the AI era: climb from L3 to the C-suite through run-based card combat that dramatizes post-AI-transformation work. Free to start, offline-first, no account required. Out now on iOS and Android. Made by Yazfab.