Wordspire: Language Card Game

Pluto.Studio

In-app purchases

About this game

Learn Spanish, French, German, Portuguese or Russian by playing a deckbuilding roguelike. You climb an endless tower; every card you play asks you a word, and how well you type it decides the action.

WordSpire is a card game and a vocabulary trainer at once: the combat system is a language. Each floor is a card battle. When you play a card, the game asks you a word - spell it exactly and the strike deals full damage. Land half the letters and it lands at half strength. Type nothing and the card is spent for nothing.

Every answer is typed. There is no multiple choice anywhere in this game, because recognising a word and producing one are not the same skill, and only one of them is speaking.

A CARD IS AN ABILITY, NOT A WORD

Cards are 6 damage, 8 shield, draw two. Which word you are asked is decided at the moment you play it, by a spaced-repetition scheduler that tracks every word you have met and knows when you are about to forget it. You never build a word list and never grind flashcards. You climb, and the practice happens inside the fight.

WHAT IS IN IT

- Thirty courses: every pairing of English, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Russian, each one in both directions - learn German from Spanish, or Russian from Portuguese, not only from English
- Between 2,600 and 3,000 words in every language, each taught inside a real example sentence with its translation, and some 14,000 ways to be asked for one
- An SM-2 spaced-repetition engine choosing every question in the game, so the vocabulary you practise is the vocabulary you are closest to losing
- 44 ability cards, and a deck of 8 to 20 that you compose before each climb
- 28 artifacts, four carried at once, that bend the rules: more time on the clock, a revealed letter, a softer landing on a wrong answer
- A forge - salvage the cards you will never play into gems, and put the ones you will under the hammer
- Branching floors, elites, shops, rests, unknown rooms, and a warden at the top of every section
- Five difficulty bands, from the 400 most common words to the rare and the awkward
- A daily goal that pays you for studying, and a global leaderboard for the deepest climb

A DECKBUILDER FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TO LEARN A LANGUAGE

If you have played a deckbuilder before, you know the shape: draw five, spend energy, meet the warden on the last floor of the section. If you have not, the card game teaches itself in a floor or two. Either way the learning is not bolted on beside it - the deck is the lesson, and a climb is language practice you did not have to talk yourself into.

NO STAMINA, NO LIVES, NO LIMIT

Nothing in this game stops you studying. There is no energy bar to wait on and no cap on how many words a day you may answer, because blocking somebody who wants to practise is the one thing a language game must never do.

OFFLINE, AND NO ACCOUNT

The whole game runs in airplane mode - vocabulary practice on a plane, on the underground, or anywhere with no signal. There is no account to make and no server holding your progress; everything lives on your device. The optional global leaderboard is the one part that uses the network, through Google Play Games.

WHAT IT COSTS

Free to play. It shows an advertisement between climbs, which a single purchase removes for good, and it offers optional ones you can trade a moment for - a second chance at a fallen climb, a free ability, a shortcut at the forge. None of them ever touch a question, your answer, or when a word comes back to you.

Learn Spanish. Learn German, French, Portuguese or Russian. Build a deck, climb a floor, and type the word.

What’s new

Portuguese and Russian arrive, and every language now pairs with every other: thirty courses, up from six. Behind them is a new corpus written for this game - 3,000 everyday ideas, each written as a sentence in all six languages at once, so a word sits at the same difficulty whichever course you climb, and around 14,000 fill-in-the-blank questions stand behind every pair.