7 years after unique puzzle brawler Battle Chef Brigade, its creators are back with another offbeat genre mash-up: ‘People like card games, hopefully they like card games that have really good characters’

In 2017, Battle Chef Brigade was the kind of indie hit that’s increasingly rare on the packed Steam store of 2024. The fascinating and novel combination of brawler and match-three puzzler didn’t sell millions upon millions of copies or make its way onto many Game of the Year lists like this year’s Balatro, but it did well enough to warrant a meaty update a year later. It was a Kickstarter game that actually came out and was good, a small miracle on its own. If you followed indie games at the time—when a mere 7,000 games were released on Steam, instead of nearly 19,000—you’d almost certainly at least heard of Battle Chef Brigade.

Seven years later, creators Trinket Studios has finally announced a new game, Battle Suit Aces: a sci-fi mecha deckbuilder drawing on beloved tales of crews jetting from planet to planet and battling in stylish, powerful mech suits. But this time you almost certainly haven’t heard about it. It was announced during the summer rush, and will launch into a genre that’s seen more than 400 new games on Steam in 2024 alone.