A la Card rolls up to Steam on December 11, 2025, bringing a food truck twist to the roguelike deckbuilder formula. It is a single-player card game from indie studio Shook Loose where you run a chaotic kitchen-on-wheels and stitch together absurd card synergies to survive waves of hungry customers and quirky bosses.
What is A la Card?
At its core, A la Card is a roguelike deckbuilder about running a food truck and bending the rules of your cards until they barely resemble what you started with. Every card is a dish, upgrade, or effect tied to your makeshift menu. Each run is a fresh route, with customers lining up at your serving window while you scramble to build a deck that can keep up with their appetites.
You will juggle ingredients, calories, and triggers while trying to keep the line moving. The tone is playful and a little chaotic, with a cute, hand-drawn presentation and a lighthearted take on cooking and card battles.
How a run plays out
A typical run sees you alternating between two main phases: cooking up your deck, and putting it to the test on the road.
In the prep phase, you load up your deck with ingredients and recipes, tweaking stats and effects to build the kind of menu that fits your playstyle. Once you hit the road, you start serving customers from the truck window, playing your cards in sequence to squeeze as much value out of your combos as possible before the shift ends.
The roguelike structure means you are chasing strong runs rather than permanent progression in the traditional RPG sense. You will lose, tweak your approach, and jump back in with new ideas for how your menu should work.
The hook: mutating your cards
The big hook in A la Card is how aggressively you can rewrite your cards.
Instead of simply adding stronger dishes to your deck, the game lets you stick one card’s effect onto another, change what triggers that effect, and swap around stats and “flavours” to build something that feels entirely custom. Over time, your deck stops looking like a standard starter list and becomes a strange, min-maxed monster of your own making.
Random events along your route give even more control. They let you adjust colors, calories, triggers, and other details mid run, turning every shift into a little design lab where you tinker with a few key cards until they become the backbone of your strategy.
Bosses as puzzles, not just stat checks
Serving regular customers is only part of the job. Each location has its own boss, and these bosses behave more like card puzzles than traditional health sponges.
They can hand you a specific card and refuse to leave until you serve it, or clog up your window with half-eaten scraps that force you to rethink your usual sequencing. The idea is that “big numbers” alone are not enough. You have to build a flexible deck that can adapt when a boss suddenly changes the rules on you.
Decks, trinkets, and long-term replay
A la Card is designed to be something you come back to for a lot of short runs. There are multiple starting decks, each tied to a unique trinket that shapes how that deck plays. As you win runs, you unlock more starting options, more trinkets, and more cards that fold into the overall pool for future attempts.
Ahead of release, the team has talked about shipping over 200 cards, more than 50 trinkets, and eight starter decks at launch, along with plans for regular post launch content drops. That gives the game a lot of room for experimentation and “I have never seen this combo before” moments.
With that many moving pieces, no two runs should look or feel the same, which is exactly what you want from a modern roguelike deckbuilder.
Who A la Card is for
If you enjoy games like Slay the Spire, Balatro, or other roguelike card battlers but want a lighter, more playful theme, A la Card looks like an easy recommendation. It leans into problem-solving and clever sequencing, rewards creativity, and adds a fresh layer of cooking and food-truck mechanics on top of familiar mechanics.
The presentation is cute and cartoony, composer Josh Whelchel handles the soundtrack, and the systems are built to support both casual “one more run before bed” sessions and more obsessive theorycrafting.
Release details
A la Card is developed and published by Shook Loose and launches on Steam for PC on December 11, 2025. It supports single player, Steam achievements, Steam Cloud, and other standard platform features.
If you like the idea of turning a simple burger into a ridiculous, rules-bending engine that carries an entire shift, this food truck is worth lining up for.
Links: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3180680/A_la_Card/