Who Plague City

Who Plague City - A No-Nonsense Guide

I stumbled onto Who Plague City about a year ago and ended up spending more time on it than I really should have. It's a mobile roguelike deckbuilder that borrows heavily from Slay the Spines framework but adds plague mechanics and city management elements on top. Most people I've talked to either love it or find it too punishing. Here's the breakdown. Download the app from the official store page. The free version gives you a decent amount of content. I'd recommend starting on easy mode because the early game punishes you if you don't learn the basic mechanics, and the tutorial is thin at best. The core loop is straightforward. You send a character into a randomized district, fight encounters, collect plague cards and relics, and manage the spread between runs. When you're not fighting, you're running your city, assigning survivors to roles, and upgrading buildings. The plague system is what separates it from other deckbuilders. Plague spreads differently depending on district density, weather, and your containment choices. Early on you're mostly reacting to outbreaks. Later you'll be using plague intentionally as a weapon against enemies who are vulnerable to it.

One thing nobody mentions enough is that most survivors have hidden traits. Your first instinct when building a team is to stack combat power. That's wrong. The trait system rewards specialization. A survivor who seems useless in combat might have a trait that doubles plague card draw when they're the only one in a district. I learned this the hard way during my third playthrough when I wiped an entire squad because I put four damage dealers in one run and forgot they all had the "panic" trait, which triggers extra plague generation when outnumbered.

Key Mechanics That Actually Matter

Plague cards are your resource engine. They fuel both your attacks and your special abilities, but they also make their way back to your city if you don't contain them. There's a balance to strike. Pulling too many plague cards into a run without a way to burn them creates a bottleneck that slows everything down. I recommend getting at least one card removal or conversion ability before commiting to a heavy plague strategy. Building upgrades are where most players waste resources. The game pushes you toward combat upgrades early because they feel impactful. The real value is in your containment buildings and your survivor rest areas. Rest areas reduce trait penalties and unlock passive bonuses for the next run. Containment buildings affect how plague spreads between districts, which directly impacts your economy because plague-positive districts generate more resources but also risk infection cascades. There's a specific interaction with the quarantine mechanic that catches people off guard. When you quarantine a district, plague stops spreading there, but so does resource production. I ran into this during a high-difficulty run where I quarantined three districts at once thinking it would stabilize my situation. I lost two weeks of in-game resources because I didn't realize the quarantine decayed slower than I expected and the production freeze hit my supply chain. The fix is to quarantine only the districts actively causing problems and rotate your quarantine focus instead of blanket-blocking.

What the Game Does Well and Where It Falls Apart

The art style is consistent and the plague effects actually look unsettling without being over the top. The soundtrack loops are fine for short sessions. The randomization on the districts keeps each run from feeling identical, which matters for a game you're going to replay forty times. The problems are real though. The grind for certain relics is brutal. I spent about six hours trying to pull a specific relic set that had maybe a four percent drop rate across multiple districts. The game doesn't tell you the odds, which is annoying but honestly pretty standard for the genre. More concerning is the RNG on plague outbreaks during late-game runs. There's a point where the game starts generating outbreaks faster than your containment can handle regardless of build, and it feels cheap rather than challenging. I've seen people blame their build when the issue is just the built-in difficulty spike that happens around district level twelve. If you're looking for alternatives, who plague city fans tend to also enjoy Carrion, Spelunky 2, or Dead Cells depending on what aspect they liked most. Carrion for the plague atmosphere, Spelunky for the risk/reward district design, and Dead Cells if you want smoother combat without the resource management layer.

Practical Tips That Actually Help

Start every run by checking your starting survivor's trait list. Don't just look at the stats. The traits tell you what kind of deck and strategy will work best. I once ran a mage build with a character who had the "vulnerable" trait and couldn't sustain plague output because every encounter weakened my cards. Switching to a melee-focused build changed everything because the same character had a trait that boosted melee damage when surrounded. Keep your resource conversion simple. There's no benefit to building complex economies when basic two-card combos clear most encounters. I watched a streamer build a complicated multi-stage plague converter that took three turns to activate and got absolutely shut down by a fast enemy in the first district. Basic combos work because they're reliable, not because they're unoptimized. The game has some hidden dialogue trees if you talk to survivors between runs. These unlock small bonuses and background lore. Not critical for progression but worth the five minutes because the info can hint at upcoming events or district modifiers.