I think it’s pretty fair to say we’ve been keeping a close eye on Card Thief here at TouchArcade, and I’m glad to hear that the beta for the game should be inching closer. As the developers have said in our Upcoming Games forum thread, a secret Guild Symbol has appeared, and that means we’re getting a Beta announcement next week. Hopefully that means the actual beta is very near. Why should you be excited? Card Thief is the follow-up to last year’s great Card Crawl (Free), and it looks to be just as clever as the latter.

In Card Thief, you draw paths between cards on a 3×3 grid to try and avoid guards while stealing some sweet treasures. As you can see in the video above, the art looks really nice, and there are mechanics like avoiding the light and moving around in the dark. There’s also a risk-reward mechanic where the longer the path, the harder the guards and the bigger the loot. I’m looking forward to this one, and if you are too, keep an eye here for further beta announcements.