Gardoon

Win the hand. Decide the tale.

Gardoon is a blackjack roguelite set in the Shahnameh, the Persian Book of Kings. Its first telling is the tragedy of Rostam, the greatest hero of his age, and Sohrab, the son he has never met.

You never fight the heroes. Across a lacquered table you duel the Deev, a spirit of misfortune, in hands played toward 21. Winning does not decide what happens. It decides who decides. At the end of each chapter someone prays: a mother, a son, a king, a father. You answer. Grant the prayer or deny it, and the story turns.

Blackjack, broken open

• Five slots, one bust limit: 21. Draw, place, stand, or pay to throw a card away.

• Farr, the divine glory of heroes, is your stake, your currency and your life.

• Six suit powers: burn a card to escape a bust, play a card on the other side, take their best, copy, compel, nullify.

• 19 chips that steal, sink, seal, tear, twin and spin the table. Common chips glint; the rare ones carry a whole night sky.

• Forge them into your deck for good, or drop one on a card in the middle of a hand.

Fortune, and its price

• At the bosses, every hand the Deev wins slips a misfortune into your deck: 12 cards of its own, each harmful, each with a clever use.

• At the Deev's Bargain, take one of two pacts. There are 15, and every one costs a Serpent in your deck.

• Earn the Wild: a card no one can read until it lands. Its 24 outcomes come from four patrons, the Simurgh, Rakhsh, Rostam's lasso and the world-revealing cup.

A tragedy told on a painted curtain

• Five chapters of Rostam and Sohrab, told close to Ferdowsi's own telling.

• Every scene plays on a pardeh, the storyteller's painted cloth, made from centuries-old manuscript paintings.

• Voices from the story reach the table. What you overhear tells you what the curtain leaves untold.

• Every chapter ends in a prayer, and every prayer has two endings. Your answers carry into the chapters that follow.

A demon worth losing to

• The Deev plays to win and never shows mercy. It talks, too, and says everything backwards.

• Every loss ends the telling. Every telling earns progress.

• Choose your road between duels: the traveller's, the merchants', the smiths' or the scholars'.

• Four starting decks, each bound in its own back from a real Persian manuscript.

• Milestone unlocks earned by playing: new chips, two new suits, the Wild and its patrons, a higher farr ceiling, new rules. Each one says plainly how it is earned.

The name

Gardoon (gardūn) is the Shahnameh's word for the turning heavens: the wheel of the sky that deals out fate.