COUP DE ROSE: Bleed, Fight, & Fall in Love
A Fatal Love Story for Two Players
You are not a person.
You are a suit of armor. A tool, cast in steel.
A shield and a sword for her Majesty’s army.
A knight.
The seasons change. The scenery changes.
You do not.
On the battlefield, you find them. A knight. An enemy. Clad in blood-soaked heraldry of a cause forgotten to them. The same as you.
As you fight, things change. A gap in the armor. Broken fingers. Shattered visors. Somewhere beneath the duty and mud, you see a person. You see yourself.
People, clad in armor.
People, wielding weapons.
And people, falling in love.
It is time for Coup de Rose, a two-player love-and-violence duet game from the new flagship studio, Gravestone Curbstomp. A TTRPG that invites you to lose yourself in the heat of battle, Coup de Rose utilizes a standard 52-card poker deck to simulate the anguish of infatuation as you and a partner drive your blades deep into each other, weaving your tragic story over a play experience that you can complete in a single afternoon.
Coup de Rose asks you to create your knight – but who they truly are is a mystery, even to you. By becoming entangled with your hated partner, you will slowly uncover who you were before the trail of conquest brought you to the battlefield. Each new battle ends in a reflection, tasking you to journal your thoughts and revelations with the knowledge that each new day will bring you back to the field of war.
In gameplay, Coup de Rose utilizes a modified system of the traditional card game War, tasking players to reduce their foe's resources (handily separated into Charm and Harm, representing the dual forces of each fight) and ultimately drive them from the battlefield in disgrace and defeat. To accomplish this, players are given a suite of special abilities tied to their identity, changing the pace of the game and giving you just that little edge to make the difference between life and untimely death.
As each round of battle unfolds, using these abilities will help players gleam insights, both about your own knight and your opponent's, asking you questions about who you were and what led you to this very moment. Cards control the mystery, giving you the opportunities to seek these answers but never freeing you from the fight.
Everything continues until you reach your crescendo, concluding your story and determining if you find love amongst the sparks of passion – or if tragedy has its way; your knight ending their tale as nothing more than a husk of canned meat, left in a pool of blood and wasted memories.
Coup de Rose is releasing on October 31, 2026 on itch.io. The digital release comes packaged with a 30-page PDF, character sheet, playingcards.io module support, and an original 21-minute ambient BGM track composed by Alaskan artist Clouds into Earth.
Interested? Gravestone Curbstomp can be found on Tumblr and Bluesky for more. You can also follow them on itch.io for future news and releases.
