Portentum is a deck-building auto battler starring cryptids. You collect a deck of monsters, roll and manipulate dice to fire off their abilities, and watch your team auto-battle round after round.
A yeti damaging the entire board with a blizzard.
Meet the cryptids
Cryptids are what broke us out on Fortnite. Hunt Bigfoot was the game that took Snowfall from zero to something, and Hunt TRex followed right behind it. Ever since, we've had players asking us for more cryptid games. So we built one with all of them in it.
Bigfoot, Nessie, Mothman, the Chupacabra, and a long list of others are all in here as units you can collect and build around.
A raccoon named Jimothy
Every other creature in Portentum is a legend nobody has ever quite managed to pin down. Jimothy is our one modern cryptid, and he's completely, verifiably real.
He's a real raccoon from the Ballard neighborhood in Seattle, and in July he became the most famous animal on the internet. Someone filmed this unusually round little guy waddling down the street, it racked up over seven million views in a matter of days, and then came the memes, the merch, an entire subreddit that filled up with thousands of posts in a week, and "hot Jimothy summer" plastered all over the city. The Mariners even put him in a team hat.
Watching a raccoon take over my city while we were quietly sitting on a cryptid game of our own felt like a sign. So Jimothy is now a card in Portentum, and we moved our announcement up to go public while he's still having his moment.
If you're here because of Jimothy, welcome. He's the newest name on a long roster of legends.
Jimothy earning his keep in battle. His signature ability is called Trash to Treasure, naturally.
Balatro meets a card game
Our lead game designer, Matt, is a serious card game player and had wanted to make a card game for a long time. We started tinkering with one as a side project, and before we knew it the side project had quietly become the main project.
The dice came from me. I love Balatro, and manipulating dice felt like the same itch as manipulating your deck. So we mashed the two ideas together. You build a deck of cryptids, and dice drive the fight. Abilities key off what you roll, so a card might read "Deals 3 damage to a single enemy when dice sum is 7 or higher." Chasing the right rolls to make your deck sing is the heart of it.
The shop between battles. Spend coin to build your roster of cryptids.
Built to launch in milliseconds
One of Matt's biggest gripes is how long Hearthstone takes to launch on mobile. We didn't want that to be us. Everything in Portentum is streamed, which is a big part of why it boots so fast. We want the gap between deciding to play and actually rolling dice to be as close to nothing as we can make it.
Free to play
We want the barrier to trying Portentum to be as low as possible. Free means anyone can jump in, roll some dice, and find out if they like it without spending a cent.
Play it at PAX West
And you won't have to wait for launch to jump in. We'll be at PAX West in Seattle from September 4 to 7 with Portentum on the show floor, so you can get your hands on it ahead of release. Come roll some dice with us. Fittingly, it's Jimothy's hometown.
Wishlist and come say hi
Portentum launches on Steam in Q4 2026.
If you want in early, the three best things you can do are wishlist Portentum, follow Snowfall Games on Steam, and join our Discord. Wishlists genuinely help a small studio like ours at launch, following us means you hear about everything we make next, and the Discord is where we'll be sharing builds, cryptids, and the occasional cursed test deck.
The whole team is beyond excited to invite you into the cryptid world of Portentum.
Roll well,
Jaden
