Everyone Expire

Everyone Expire is a card-driven tabletop deckbuilder that flips the genre on its head: you don't play the hero, or even the party. You play the Dungeon Master, and you're not a fair one.
Each run, you lead a party of adventurers drawn from a persistent roster (real, recurring characters, each with a class, a signature flaw, and a stack of exploitable personality traits) through a route of hand-built encounters toward a final boss lair. Play enough runs and you'll start recognising your targets before they even sit down: exactly which lie gets one of them moving, precisely what excuse it takes to keep another quiet. You choose what tempts them. You choose what hurts them. When the dice don't go your way, you have a hand of cards that says the dice were wrong.
It's part deckbuilder, part push-your-luck dungeon crawl, part dark comedy about exactly how much power a screen gives the person behind it.
The loop: BAIT → FUDGE → BETRAY → EXPIRE

Lay the trap. Let them pick it.
Every encounter, you deal bait cards onto the table (a hooded stranger, a keg of free ale, a suspiciously unguarded cellar door) and the party decides what looks worth the risk. Every card carries a DC, a payoff, and a cost if it goes wrong, across six flavours: Temptation, Trap, Social, Threat, Route and Monster. You're not forcing their hand. You're just making sure the worst option looks like the best one.
300+ bait cards, each with its own DC, damage, and flavour text

Adventurer traits change what they're drawn to: greedy, afraid of spiders, "licks things." Read the room, then build the room around it

Every card shows exactly what it costs and pays out before you commit: the DC to beat, the damage on a failure, which stat rolls against it, and the Spite it banks you either way

Every roll happens in the open. What happens after doesn't.
Dice land where they land, in full view, every die on screen. Then, if the result is inconvenient, you quietly play a card from the DM's Fudge Hand. Loaded Dice. Doppelgangers. A rounding error that was "always" three points worse than it looked. Nobody saw anything.

A growing Fudge Codex of cards like I'm Taking Notes (+1 DC, -1 to the party's roll: "the notebook comes out, everyone gets nervous") and One Moment, Please, which drops a fresh bait card or a whole new minion into a boss fight you're already losing

Every card shows its burn odds up front (a 50% chance it's gone after one use), so every fudge is a real gamble, not a free win

Higher DM levels unlock nastier tools: group disadvantage, forced decisions, forced natural 1s

Occasionally you draw a Cursed card that helps the party instead. You'll hate it; they won't know why you look so pleased to lose

Sway one. Sway all. Watch them push back.
The party doesn't just sit there and take it. They interrupt you. Mid-encounter, one adventurer will call out to another, and you get a choice: let it go, or sacrifice a card from your own hand to make their roll harder. Every adventurer keeps a full sheet of stats, traits, afflictions and skills, so by the time you've run a few campaigns you know exactly who wards off a hex, who panics under pressure, and who's worth the card you'll burn interrupting them.
Every recurring adventurer has a readable sheet: stat block, exploitable traits, current afflictions, and what their skills actually do in a fight

Interrupts are a real trade-off: burn a card from a five-card hand to swing someone else's roll, or save it and let the moment pass

Grouped rolls resolve together when multiple adventurers pile onto the same card, and every pass or fail gets its own dramatic reveal, dice and all

Ten classes, each with a signature flaw and a pool of paired quirks: Afraid of Spiders and Cannot Swim happens, and it's magnificent

Lead them all the way to the lair. Then take the credit.
Bad ideas compound. Encounter by encounter, across a hand-authored route through themed Areas (tavern, forest, shrine, crypt, cavern and beyond), you steer a party that trusts you completely toward a boss with its own minions, phases, and orders you assign yourself. The scoring is blunt about what it wants from you: misery held above threshold, the party reached the final boss, a TPK at the lair. Nail all three and the game itself calls it a Perfectly Timed TPK.
A full route of Areas and Encounters ending in a multi-phase boss fight: assign minions their targets, guard objectives, and burn fudge cards mid-fight to tip it further

A run verdict that scores how it ended, not just whether it did: timing the kill matters as much as landing it

Meta-progression persists between campaigns: DM level, XP, career stats, and a loot crate to open on every level-up

Unlock new bait, new Fudge cards, new Talents (permanent upgrades bought with Infamy, "+1 to the DM's d20 on every sway," and worse), and new dungeon-building pieces for the campaign map

Meet your employer

Malice didn't apply for this job. He stole it. He spent longer than he'll admit watching adventuring parties controled from somewhere above the clouds, before he worked out that a die could be persuaded, and longer still before he worked out that misery goes further if the party lives long enough to really feel it. Now he's hiring. You're the apprentice. He supplies the contracts, the cards, and a truly relentless amount of running commentary. You supply the suffering. Done properly. With paperwork.

The party

Your party comes from a roster of recurring named adventurers, each locked to one of ten classes, a signature flaw, and a hand of quirks stacked on top. Run to run, the faces change, but the same characters resurface, so their weaknesses stop being a surprise and start being a plan. Sometimes the quirks pair up badly. That's not a bug.
Rogue: enters last, leaves with more than he brought

Cleric: great faith in providence, very little faith in bridges

Bard: treats a dungeon as an unusually hostile venue

Ranger: reads tracks more readily than expressions

...plus Fighter, Paladin, Warlock, Druid, and more, each with their own HP, signature move, and exploitable soft spot

Between runs: the Study, the Codex, and a shelf you have to earn
Your DM career lives in a Study (bookshelves, a ledger, a set of dice on the desk) that fills in as you play. The Codex catalogues every bait card, fudge card and monster you've met. Talents spend a slow-burn currency called Infamy on permanent upgrades to how you run a table. Achievements range from the straightforward (survive three runs in a row, "shameful, for a bad DM") to the secret, and every campaign ends with a loot crate: three cards, pick one, the other two stay locked forever (or until the next one).
Every so often, a bait card doesn't just resolve, it opens into its own wildcard minigame. Lose a Battle of the Bards to the party's own musician and he plays circles around your intimidation for the rest of the encounter.