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 | 2026 |
| Model | Free base game (the Engineer); Engineering Manager, Product Manager, and CEO ship as paid DLC, each with a free first tier. No ads, no gacha, no energy timers. |
| Run length | 25 to 40 minutes; a single sprint is 8 to 12 |
| Website | laddergame.ai |
| 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
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 on iOS and Android, offline-first, no account required. Made by Yazfab.