You are not the hero of this dungeon. You are the chest.

Floor 1 - click, drag, grow, descend

Skeletons rise out of the flagstones and wander. Click them apart. Then pick up what they dropped, literally: grab a coin, carry it to the chest, let go. The lid swings open as you get close, and the whole chest pops a little bigger every time you feed it.

Fill the floor’s band and the chest turns gold. The stairs light up. up you go, and the chest comes with you, still the size you grew it to.

Floor 5 - something enormous wakes up

A boss claws its way out of the floor at more than twice the size of anything else down here, with a health bar across the entire top of the screen. You get thirty seconds. Miss the window and the dungeon shoves you back up a floor to think about it.

Floor 6 - where clicking stops being enough

Elites turn up first: fatter, larger, worth far more. Then the Armoured arrive, and they are the real gate. Any hit softer than 2% of an Armoured skeleton’s health barely scratches it, and says so in cold blue numbers.

Floor 12 - hire people who swing for you

Knight, Rogue, Barbarian, Ranger, Mage: five adventurers, each a real body in the room that walks to the nearest skeleton and puts a weapon through it. Every unit is physically larger than the one below.

Go wide or go deep. Hire another copy and each one costs a little more; level the unit and every copy you already own hits harder at once. The Mage costs about two hundred thousand times what the Knight does, and earns it.

They do the grinding. You still do the greed, nothing reaches the chest unless you put it there.

Not every coin is a coin

Loot rolls a rarity. Most of it is ordinary gold, but Silver, Royal and Prismatic coins glow brighter, land louder and are worth up to forty-five times as much. You can spot a good drop from across the room before you touch it.

And then there is Midas. Grab it and every loose coin on the floor empties itself into the chest at once, a fresh payout rains from the ceiling, and the whole screen turns gold.

Floor ∞ - reforge it

Eventually the numbers win. So you pour the hoard, the whole giant thing, back into the forge, and it comes out as a better chest. Oak becomes Iron, then Bronze, Silver, Gold, Emerald, Ruby, Astral.

You lose the floors, the gold and the party. You keep a chest of a different colour that makes everything you will ever do hit almost twice as hard. Then you start again at floor one, very small, with much bigger hands.

Why it’s about scale

The theme isn’t a metaphor here. Six things in this game literally change size.

• The chest, ×1 → ×4.5. Its world scale is the progress bar. It never shrinks between floors.
• The camera. Distance is derived from chest scale, grow the hoard and the dungeon backs away to fit it.
• The skeletons, ×1.35 → ×2.3. Deeper floors are bigger bones. Ranked ones are bigger still.
• The boss, ×2.15. The same skeleton you have been killing all game, and now it needs its own bar.
• Your party, ×0.85 → ×1.95. Knight to Mage, every unit is a physically larger body than the one before it.
• Reforging, 8 tiers. The one moment scale runs backwards: the whole hoard, traded for a chest of a better colour.

Bonus challenges

• Mouse only. There is no keyboard input anywhere in the game. The cursor itself changes to tell you what you are about to do: a crosshair on a skeleton, an open hand on a coin, a green reticle on stairs you have earned.

How to play

• Left click — strike a skeleton. Chain hits to build a combo; it ramps your damage up to +120%.
• Click and drag — pick a coin off the floor and carry it into the chest. This is the whole game.
• Or just tap it — a quick click on a coin sends it home by itself, for when the floor is knee-deep in gold.
• Click a glow — elixirs, relics, caches, and a skull that smites the entire room.
• Click the stairs — once the chest is big enough they light up. Go deeper.

Art & audio

Every model, sprite, typeface and sound in HOARD is stock, used as supplied.

KayKit, by Kay Lousberg — Dungeon Pack, Skeletons, Adventurers, Halloween Bits, Furniture Bits, Character Animations.

Kenney — UI Pack: Adventure, UI Pack: Sci-Fi, the Kenney Future typefaces, Impact Sounds, RPG Audio, Casino Audio, Interface Sounds, Music Jingles.

Built in Godot 4.7. Thank you to Kay and Kenney, whose packs are the entire visual and audible surface of this game.