Decoction

A 1690s apothecary game

$2.99 · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.

A historical-fiction roguelike grounded in Culpeper. Replay seeded tours. Not medical advice. Cure the cough. Don't poison the squire. Decoction is a historical-fiction roguelike deck-builder set inside a 1690s European apothecary shop. Patients arrive at your door with ailments described in period language. You diagnose the humoral imbalance, draw a hand of ingredient cards, and combine them in the mortar to formulate a remedy. Historical plant content is principally grounded in the public-domain Project Gutenberg transcription of Nicholas Culpeper's The Complete Herbal (eBook 49513), with period claims framed as history rather than guidance. Decoction is a historical fiction game inspired by 17th-century pharmacopoeia. Nothing herein is medical advice. Do not treat real illness with herbal remedies. Consult a licensed physician for any health concern. WHAT'S IN THE BOX - 150 ingredient cards, hand-authored from Culpeper sources. Herbs, minerals, animal products, spirits, syrups, powders, and pre-prepared decoctions, each with its own humoral signature, planetary rulership, and attribution quote. - 60 hand-authored patient cases. Villagers, townsmen, gentry, and grandees. Phlegmatic catarrhs. Sanguine fevers. Choleric biles. Saturnine melancholies. - A diagnose-and-formulate puzzle loop. Read the symptoms, choose a humour, draw five cards, play two to four, score the cure. - A seven-day campaign tour through villages with persistent reputation and gold. Three grievous failures and the constable invites you to leave town. Eighty percent cures and you triumph. - A 25-achievement board covering every planetary rulership, every difficulty band, and a Compleat Cabinet for unlocking the materia medica. - Period instruments soundtrack rendered procedurally on device. Lute, recorder, and viola da gamba in Dorian and Mixolydian modes. No samples shipped. - Local SwiftData persistence. Your tours survive a relaunch. - Optimised for iPhone and iPad. Portrait on iPhone, all orientations on iPad. THE PROMISE No subscriptions. No in-app purchases. No expansion packs. No tracking, no analytics, no third-party SDKs. The privacy manifest declares no data collection. THE FRAME Decoction preserves period language because the puzzle is built on the texts of the period. We have kept the original attributions and astrological notes from Culpeper. None of it is medical advice. Several historical remedies were ineffective and some were actively harmful. Saying so is part of why evidence-based medicine exists and part of why this is a game, not a pharmacy. If you are unwell, please consult a licensed clinician.

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Decoction 3.0 - Reproducible Tours: • Every campaign now has a shareable, checksum-validated replay code. Re-enter it to reproduce the village, patient sequence, hands, events, and market offers for the same school and Rigour. • Resume integrity checks safely repair reconstructible legacy state. Save failures are no longer silent: an in-app recovery notice explains the risk and offers Retry Save. • The Tour Journal now carries replay codes alongside case history, making campaign decisions easier to revisit and share. • Historical source and safety framing is clearer throughout ingredient and formulation screens, with a direct link to the public-domain Project Gutenberg Culpeper source (eBook 49513) and explicit non-medical boundaries. • Improved Dynamic Type and VoiceOver labeling in touched campaign screens. No new permissions, network services, tracking, or analytics.

The developer, Robert Corbin, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .

  • Data Not Collected

    The developer does not collect any data from this app.

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    Seller
    • Robert Corbin
    Size
    • 40.9 MB
    Category
    • Card
    Compatibility
    Requires iOS 17.0 or later.
    • iPhone
      Requires iOS 17.0 or later.
    • iPad
      Requires iPadOS 17.0 or later.
    • Mac
      Requires macOS 14.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.
    • Apple Vision
      Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
    Languages
    • English
    Age Rating
    13+
    • 13+
    • Infrequent
      Medical Treatment information
    Copyright
    • © 2026 Robert Corbin