Negotiation: resolve orbs, argument badges and a targeted card

About this game

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

More Griftlands screens in the Gallery

What to study

Griftlands' famous second deck, caught mid-argument: a negotiation is staged exactly like a duel, two figures in glowing rings, a resolve number each (30 against 20), and the opponent's arguments pinned to her as hourglass badges your cards target one by one. The design move worth studying is that nothing changes venue: the speech bubble stays at the top, the deck/discard/actions strip stays at the bottom, END TURN and CONCEDE sit where a fight would put them, and the only swap is the deck in your hand, Threaten and Fast Talk instead of blades. Talking someone down and beating them down are the same screen with different ammunition, which is the game's whole thesis rendered as layout. Frame at about 0:11 in the Announcement Trailer (Steam; manual extraction, the negotiation holds for several seconds while Fast Talk is aimed, between the trailer's scene cuts).

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

card-hand hud-overlay

Components

Parts on screen.

Card Portrait Speech bubble Vitals bar Badge Dialogue box

Screen inventory

• the two speakers stand inside glowing rings, Sal's cyan at left, the bartender-thug's at right turning green as she is targeted, and each ring carries a single big orb with one number, 30 for Sal and 20 for her: in a negotiation, resolve is a health bar reduced to a number you argue down
• the opponent's arguments are physical badges pinned around her portrait: two hourglass chips marked 3-5 float at the top of her ring and a third hourglass argument sits on her chest, the things your cards attack are objects worn by the person, not rows in a panel
• the card being played is lifted out of the hand and aimed: Fast Talk (cost 1 in the top-left disc, range 2-3 across the top) is raised at the right of the hand, and a dotted cyan targeting line runs from the card up into the opponent's 20 orb, playing a sentence is drawn as taking a shot
• the hand fans across the bottom centre, every card edged in the same green glow as the target ring: three identical Threaten cards (cost 1, range 1-3, 'Generate 1 Hostility') and a 0-cost Setup whose visible text begins 'Gain Influence 1. At the end of the turn, lose…', hostility and influence, the negotiation's two currencies, are printed on the cards themselves
• the bottom-left corner never stops being the RPG HUD even mid-conversation: DECK 6, DISCARD 0 and ACTIONS 3/3 in glowing cyan boxes, then a gold coin with 500 and a heart with 50/50, your money and your body stay on screen while you talk, because both are at stake in the argument
• the talk itself is one mint speech bubble at top centre, 'What do you want, grifter?', and the bottom right offers END TURN and CONCEDE: a conversation you can surrender like a fight, with the same button grammar

Top 3 colors

#443d36 22%#141716 22%#28201d 21%

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-negotiation-11.png @ 11.5s in the Announcement Trailer, MD5 cbd4e687807c36b4fc15cc40588bdd0b, 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); both resolve orbs (30 / 20), all three hourglass argument badges, the four-card hand, the DECK/DISCARD/ACTIONS strip, the 500 gold and 50/50 health readouts and both END TURN / CONCEDE buttons legible; the speech bubble is the game's own dialogue presentation; 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.