Mateforge vs Blackjackal
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both games, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Mateforge
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Mateforge is a single-player chess roguelike deckbuilder. Command an army of chess pieces, cast powerful spell cards, and survive an ever-collapsing board across an endless run of battles. Each round the board crumbles beneath you — capture every enemy before it does. Between fights, draft upgrades, recruit and merge pieces, forge your deck, and grow stronger for the boss waiting ahead. FEATURES - Chess meets roguelike — pieces move by real chess rules, but the board falls apart every turn - Build your deck — craft custom decks from 29 spell cards: lightning, meteors, freezes, teleports and more - Evolve your pieces — defeat bosses to permanently evolve your army through 3 tiers of power - Merge & recruit — fuse pieces into stronger ones and expand your squad - Boss battles — face bosses with shields, swift moves and spawning, scaling in difficulty - Daily challenge — a new rule-bending mutator every day - Meta progression — earn shards and unlock permanent perks that carry across runs - Endless runs — no two are ever the same - 6 languages — English, Türkçe, Deutsch, Français, Español, Italiano How far can you get before the board swallows you?
Blackjackal
This card game reimagines blackjack as a roguelike deckbuilder. Build powerful scoring engines, edit your deck, and specialize in hand types to break the table. Enjoy a full run in about forty minutes with progress saving after every hand.
- Roguelike deckbuilding mechanics
- Strategic card editing and enhancement
- Build exponential scoring engines
- Permanent hand type specialization
- Escalating ante and boss challenges
- Offline single-player gameplay
- Progress saving after every hand
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This is not the blackjack you know. You are not trying to beat a dealer — you are trying to break the table, one chips × mult hand at a time. Blackjack, rebuilt as a roguelike deckbuilder: escalating blinds, a shop full of charms, builds that go exponential. No ads, no timers, no currency to buy — one payment unlocks everything, forever. Every hand you hold six cards and choose which to play. Twenty-one is not a stopping rule in this card game — it is a constraint. The same 21 is worth wildly different amounts depending on how you make it: three cards is decent, two is better, and five cards landing on exactly 21 is worth seven times the first. That choice is the whole game. BUILD A SCORING ENGINE Between blinds you shop. 73 charms, three slots, and every pick is a read on how you actually play. Multiplicative charms only beat flat bonuses once your hands are good enough — so buying one is a judgement call about your own skill, not a strictly better upgrade. This is deck building where the strategy is yours to find, not a tree to unlock in order. EDIT THE DECK ITSELF Remove the cards that clog your hands. Duplicate the ones that finish them. Enhance a card so it counts as any suit and turns a conditional charm into a build. Decisions you make now pay off twenty hands later. Few blackjack games — or card games of any kind — let you rewrite the deck you are drawing from mid-run. LEVEL WHAT YOU ARE GOOD AT Study a hand type and its base improves permanently for that run. Specialise hard enough and charms that were useless become the best in the shop. Two runs with the same seed can end up completely different builds. EIGHT ANTES, ONE BUDGET Three blinds each, escalating targets, and a boss that changes the rules at the end of every ante. Four hands a blind and three discards for the whole ante — the deck you draw from is deliberately small, so a long hand costs you the ones that follow, and spending a discard early means not having it for the boss. TEN ROOMS, ONE BUILDING Win a run and the casino lets you deeper: the kitchen table, the smoky back room, the velvet room, the shark pool, the counting room — ten rooms down to the Vault, and every room adds a house rule the ones above it don't have. Carried study fades the deeper you go; the Vault takes none at all. Progress is real without making the next run a formality. THE DAILY TABLE One free seeded run a day — the same deck for everyone, one attempt. And any run's seed can be copied and shared, so a friend can race you on the exact same deal. A ROGUELIKE THAT RESPECTS YOUR TIME A full run is about forty minutes and it saves after every hand, so it survives being closed mid-blind. No energy, no timers, no daily login you have to honour. ONE PAYMENT Play the first three antes free. Unlock the whole game once, and that is the last time the game asks you for anything. No advertising in play. No currency to buy. Card backs are earned by playing, never sold. Blackjackal is a single player blackjack card game and roguelike deckbuilder that works completely offline — no wifi, no account, no sign-in — and collects no data at all. A four-colour deck option keeps every suit readable, whatever your eyes make of red and green.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Mateforge at none against Blackjackal's 1. Blackjackal's advantage is ads (none vs shown). On price, update cadence, device support and iOS requirement there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Blackjackal sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. Mateforge asks for nothing beyond the download.
Both ship on a similar rhythm, roughly every 5 days. The most recent releases landed on October 31, 2026 and October 11, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Mateforge | Blackjackal |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | — | 5.0 (3 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | — | 100.0% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | — | 3 — better |
| Update frequency | Every 5 days | Every 5 days |
| Ads | Yes | No — better |
| In-app purchases | No — better | Yes |
| Monetization | — | Free with in-app purchases |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, iPod |
| Requires iOS | 15.0 | 15.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 9 MB | 79 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 12+ |
| Developer | Salih Eksioglu | Prakash Mishra |
In-app purchases
Mateforge
No in-app purchases
Blackjackal
- Full Game$4.99








