Battle: a six-fighter bar fight read from one raised card

About this game

Developer: Klei Entertainment · Publisher: Klei Entertainment · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Comic & cartoon · Screen type: Battle / Tactics

More Griftlands screens in the Gallery

What to study

The other deck, in the same bar: where the negotiation filled the screen with rings and orbs, the battle frame strips the HUD back to a single decision, six fighters posed across the room with no bars or boxes on them, and all the information pushed into the fan of cards at the bottom, the hovered Uppercut (cost 2, range 2-5, 'Gain Power 1') enlarged until it is the biggest object in the frame. The pairing with the negotiation screen is the study: identical staging, identical speech bubbles ('There's too many of 'em!'), identical hand, Klei teaches one interface and then runs both halves of the game through it, so learning to fight teaches you to argue. Frame at about 1:00 in the Announcement Trailer (Steam; manual extraction, the hand settles with Uppercut raised between the trailer's action beats). Disclosure: this trailer frame shows no per-character health bars and no deck/actions strip, the battle HUD here is the hand alone.

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

card-hand minimal-hud

Components

Parts on screen.

Card Speech bubble Vitals bar Dialogue box

Screen inventory

• six fighters are staged across the bar room in two loose lines with no selection boxes or health bars over them: Sal centre-back, twin blades out, flanked by a masked fighter with a sickle, a yellow alien swinging a hammer in a stained apron and a bearded brawler, against a crossbowman and an axe-and-shield fighter at right, the battle is read by silhouette and weapon, and the interface concentrates entirely in the hand
• the hand sits at bottom centre and the chosen card enlarges straight out of it, edged in green: Uppercut, its cost 2 in a red disc, damage range 2-5 across the top beside a small blade icon, and one line of rules text, 'Gain Power 1', on a red body, so the card you are about to play is the largest text on the screen
• the unchosen cards stay half-visible behind the enlarged one, still readable at their edges: Feint at left (cost 1, 'Self only. Defend 3'), Stab at right (cost 1, range 2-4), and a Fight Dirty card between them whose text the enlarged Uppercut partly covers, the fan preserves the alternatives you gave up while you commit to one
• combat keeps the conversation system: a mint speech bubble floats over the middle of the fight, 'There's too many of 'em!', the same bubble used for negotiation lines in this trailer, so fighters banter inside the battle frame instead of the battle pausing for cutscenes

Top 3 colors

#121613 24%#2f2419 22%#4e422b 16%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© Klei Entertainment, Griftlands screenshot: Steam trailers (Announcement Trailer), Klei Entertainment, shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Klei Entertainment.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-27. verified 2026-10-27: manual extraction manual-battle-60.png @ 60.0s in the Announcement Trailer, MD5 6a73823b70754a6b7195a337846bced4, from the verified-clean curl-shim download (54,176,157 B, MD5 add2c44c84c86cb04e60b66c0ee0596d; full decode to null with -xerror exit 0, zero error lines, decode-steam-601840-Announcement-Trailer.err), inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080 native); all six fighters, the enlarged Uppercut card with cost/range/text, the Feint and Stab cards at its sides and the speech bubble legible; no trailer text, caption or marketing overlay in frame

Klei Entertainment Player Creation Guidelines (https://support.klei.com/hc/en-us/articles/360029880791-Player-Creation-Guidelines, checked 2026-10-27): public sharing of player creations is allowed under the Golden Rules, and videos of or about Klei games may be uploaded to video-sharing/streaming sites and monetized; the Griftlands-specific support page (https://support.klei.com/hc/en-us/articles/360044520072-Can-I-stream-or-make-videos-of-Griftlands, checked 2026-10-27) confirms streaming and videos of Griftlands are welcome per those guidelines

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.