Screenshots
Watch trailer on Steam ↗Davy Jones' Deckhand
Cass Bay Games · Published by Cass Bay Games · Official site ↗
Last updated 6 Oct 2026
Parry and counter-attack your way from lowly deckhand to undead legend – the only deckbuilder where getting hit right is better than not getting hit at all. Master combat stances, perfect-parries, and powerful artefacts to outsmart pirate hordes and break free from Davy’s cursed Black Spot.
Adventure, Indie, Strategy · More free games
Navigate treacherous seas as Davy Jones' lowly deckhand, mastering combat techniques to outsmart hordes of pirates. Craft your strategy with powerful artefacts and emerge as an undead legend on Cass Bay Games' unique adventure platformer.
About this game
Counter-attack carnage: Perfect parries are your key to victory!
Getting hit right is better than not getting hit at all! Fill your parry meter to perfectly match incoming damage. When you hit the bell to end your turn, enemy attacks will be countered to devastating effect.
Master powerful new stances
Play stance cards onto the primary and secondary slots. Position yourself to deflect attacks and strike down your foes. Discover new stance cards with powerful effects and special counter attacks.
Navigate the High Seas
Chart your own route using your telescope. Select your next encounter based on the rewards you want: gold, special cards, or urgent healing? Voyages are procedurally generated based on your chosen destination using factors like distance and biome. To reach your destination you’ll have to survive the entire voyage, otherwise you’ll find yourself back in The Locker where Davy Jones will resurrect you back to the last island you were on to try again!
Strategically fill your cargo before setting sail
As you navigate the world, you’ll build up a permanent inventory of treasures and trinkets, but you can’t bring them all with you on voyages. Before setting sail, fill your limited cargo slots with artefacts, consumables or coins. Experiment with different starter item combos to give your next voyage a boost!
Get loot or die trying!
Discover hundreds of cards to build your deck, and plunder powerful artefacts. Upon death you’ll have to bargain your way back from Davy’s locker and start over!
Pay your debts: Hunt the leviathan
Resurrection comes with a price. Your contract with Davy Jones is marked by The Black Spot, a curse that will plague your deckbuilding until you finally complete Davy’s quest to kill the mythical mega-whale known as Leviathan.
Your next favorite roguelike deckbuilder!
Davy Jones’ Deckhand is a deckbuilding roguelike with a counter-attack system that turns the genre on its head, promoting precision and careful management of your character's fighting stance.
Fresh spin on card combat - Counter-attacks reward risky last minute parries over tanky defense, making this game like nothing you’ve played before!
Game changing loot - Plunder powerful artefacts that synergise with your custom deck to become an unstoppable terror of the seas
Discover new weapons - Each weapon comes with its own starter deck and unique stances, completely changing your playstyle
Endlessly replayable - From the biome you’re travelling through to the deck you build to the weapon you choose, you’ll never experience the same voyage twice. Explore NPC quests or complete gauntlets for an extra brutal challenge
Pirates ✅
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- OS: Windows 10 64-Bit / Windows 11 64-bit
- Processor: Dual core CPU (Core i3 6100 or higher)
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: GT1030, 2GB VRAM
- Storage: 2 GB available space
Supported Languages
*languages with full audio support
Latest news
AnnouncementsOfficial
StartUp grant success & Montreal International Game Summit 🏴☠️
Ahoy crew, welcome below deck! Forgive me for cutting it very fine getting a newsletter out this month. My son Henry was born three weeks ago, so I've been completely switched off from the game for a while. I am about to return to work though, and for the first time I will be truly full-time! Which leads into the first piece of exciting news to share in this edition of Below Deck... $250,000 CODE StartUp Grant We're very pleased to announce that our CODE StartUp grant application has been successful. This is a pivotal moment for the studio, allowing us to operate for the next 14 months with the full team at various capacities. I am especially excited for fresh art assets from our amazing art team, and to begin working in a more official capacity with sound designers, Erin and Sarah, who previously interned with Cass Bay Games as part of their master's studies. Over the next year we plan to reveal a schedule of playtests in advance, so keep an eye out for an announcement and roadmap in the not-too-distant future. I will also be looking for ways to offer more interaction with the team on Discord. It's going to be a big year! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45576904/0f0c597342154640f4efcc7ec9f115e48d450bcd.png Read more about the CODE funding decisions in the official press release. Montreal International Game Summit {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45576904/a94bec563400a2db1be43e4c8aefb4825435cdd7.jpg One final piece of news for this very brief newsletter: I will be attending MIGS in Canada as part of the CODE NZ cohort. I will have the opportunity to pitch to a room full of publishers at an event run by Representing Games, and to take individual pitch meetings during the two-day conference. Our CODE grant thankfully gets us most of the way through production, but I will still be looking for a publishing partner to invest in our marketing, porting, localization, etc. Thanks for sticking around through a slow month! I look forward to sharing many more exciting updates soon. As always, why is the...Read full article on Community Announcements (Cass Bay Games)AnnouncementsOfficial
Dynamic World Map and Voyage Manifest 🏴☠️
Ahoy crew, welcome below deck! I've been working on another 3D element for the game recently: the new and improved world map! The old map looked great, a beautiful hand-crafted perspective drawing, but it was by nature static and "baked-in" to that particular view, and those particular islands. So over the past month I've been revamping the entire system to be more dynamic. I'm also still waiting for my baby boy to grace us with his presence. When he's born I'll be taking a few weeks off. When I return I hope to be able to share some more exciting news with you... As always I must sincerely ask, why is the rum gone? Ben August summary Dynamic World Map (rebuilt from scratch!) Pathfinding for voyage routes Gamepad and mouse controls for navigation and zoom in/out Voyage Manifest (new and improved voyage setup screen) Dynamic World Map {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45576904/d366871e475cf8b163b50eed93f6c627ca25f21c.gif This new dynamic map allows for complete user control. You can freely scroll around the map, and zoom in and out to your liking. To achieve this while maintaining the perspective style of our original map I followed similar principles to how I got the 3D journal working (see last months Below Deck). 3D perspective with 2D art Firstly, the world map isn't actually 3D, it's a flat, top-down layer of sprites and "world-space" text, sitting on a dedicated camera layer so only a particular camera can see it. Then its own dedicated orthographic camera looks straight down on that flat content, and renders what it sees to a Render Texture. When the player is scrolling and zooming, what they are actually doing is moving that camera and shrinking/growing its orthographic size. The map itself never moves. The texture captured by the flat map camera is then sent to other parts of the game, most commonly the "3D map viewer", which is the perspective angle the player experiences. In this case, the flat map is projected onto a 3D plane, which is viewed by a perspective camera, ar...Read full article on Community Announcements (Cass Bay Games)AnnouncementsOfficial
New "Ship Log" will have EVERYTHING 🏴☠️
Ahoy crew, welcome below deck! Another month has flown by. I'm rapidly approaching the due date of my third child now. While we're in a bit of a development limbo period, I've been busily chipping away at the game. In this month's newsletter I'll share a summary of progress and a deep-dive into an upcoming new feature: the "Ship Log" menu. Smooth sailing, Ben July summary Steam Cloud saves working on the playtest beta branch Rework of card visual prefabs to allow for a selection outline Ship Log begun: 3D system Sorting/Filtering system to allow deep player control Controller navigation The upcoming "Ship Log" feature {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45576904/c1ad17a93c615fe64af55be1daa2b8e3758ba063.gif This has been a big piece of work over the past month. Most of the time game menus are flat, with 2D images, text and panels drawn straight onto your screen. But Davy Jones' Deckhand is a bit of an outlier, in that so far we have done almost everything in screen-space UI. But the new Ship Log I've been working on isn't built that way at all, and that choice came with some challenges that are interesting to explain. I decided to make the Ship Log menu a real 3D object, so we could have the pages naturally curved and flippable. To achieve this, instead of drawing the menu as a flat picture, I've built an actual little 3D scene, a physical book model sitting in its own miniature space. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45576904/c4a4fa8b60225ff3e07ea5be2266a7f69f8d343f.png The trouble with doing this as a 3D scene is that Unity Engine naturally draws UI overtop of that world-space stuff. This is particularly difficult for our game because almost nothing is world-space and everything is UI, including our main combat. So to have our 3D Ship Log menu render over-top of the combat scene, we use a hidden camera that "films" the book continuously, and the live footage is pasted onto a flat UI, like a photograph being updated 60 times a second. It sounds like a roundabout way to show a menu, but it's the t...Read full article on Community Announcements (Cass Bay Games)AnnouncementsOfficial
UI rework, souls, and a secret mini-game 🏴☠️ | 'Below Deck' June 2026
Ahoy crew, welcome below deck! I'm cutting it fine for a newsletter this month. Last week my family and I were wiped out by illness, as is the current trend in winter with young kids. We hit another milestone… thank you for 3,000 wishlists! We gained more than 1,000 new wishlists since our newsletter last month when I announced hitting 2K, thanks in no small part to Frosty Fest. We weren't in the actual showcase, but we still enjoyed our best month of growth so far. We still have a long way to go, but it's nice to see some traction building up even in these early stages of development. The Frosty Games Fest showcase is on YouTube if you want to check out some awesome ANZ indie games. A favourite of mine was the beautifully hand-drawn Apothecurse by Lesser Key Studios in Dunedin. Keep reading for some insights into the design changes that have been happening over the past month. Why is the rum gone? Sincerely, Ben Demo clip competition winner! Congratulations to Wade for winning the demo clips competition. We put the best community clips of the Davy Jones' Deckhand demo to a vote in our Discord, and Wade's outrageous overkill clip took the win. I mean look at that damage, the poor crab. Wade's prize was a custom avatar in the style of the game, hand-drawn by our character artist Nik Scarr. Wade's a lawyer, can you tell? {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45576904/84d18706ce5301ae15a0b2541ac14dadd1049609.png {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45576904/516393b7ca98a6634e779e8a3f447c5d6bcdd02c.png UI rework After the demo launch madness, I've enjoyed the opportunity to slow down and experiment with some new features, make UI improvements, and build some of the foundations for the next major evolution of Davy Jones' Deckhand. We've been having many discussions with our playtest community on Discord about changes to the UI layout. The biggest change is visible in this comparison image: we've moved enemy HP bars to sit below the enemies. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45576904/06d1697227b57ba0b41b0ea6dbebe8f17cddbd8...Read full article on Community Announcements (Cass Bay Games)Community & EventsOfficial
Frosty Fest creator broadcast
Don't miss playthroughs from some of our favourite creators here: https://steamcommunity.com/broadcast/watch/76561199825638096 Play the latest demo build:Check out the Frosty Fest Steam page:https://store.steampowered.com/curator/45423962/sale/FrostyGamesCelebration2026 Featured in this broadcast:The Geek CupboardRead full article on Community Announcements (Cass Bay Games)
