Arcanum Solitarius

Arcanum Solitarius is poker solitaire with an arcane twist. Its currently available as a free demo here on Steam and beta testing for the full game.

Build a 5x5 grid of poker hands, one card at a time. Draw a card from the deck and drop it into any open space. When a row or column fills with five cards, it scores immediately, earning the value of the poker hand it contains. The cards that made the hand vanish; the ones that didn't — your kickers — stay behind. Reach the target score before the deck runs out to win the round.

What's in the full game

The full game has 22 bosses, each a cursed tarot card from the Major Arcana, and one per ante. There are 3 blinds per ante, for a total of 66 blinds.  The full game also includes 37 different jokers you can discover.

Poker in 2 dimensions

Every card you place belongs to two hands at once — the row it sits in and the column it crosses. You're building five hands across and five down at the same time, and each placement decides which line a card serves and what it costs the other. Cards come one at a time, so you're always working with what the deck gives you, not what your plan wanted. You set out to build a Royal Flush and settle for Two Pair.

Break the curses

The Arcana of The Fool's Journey arrive cursed: corrupted tarot cards that warp the playing rules and inflict scoring penalties. You meet them in boss rounds, and they don't leave on their own — purify a curse or it keeps taxing every round that follows. The demo's three are only the beginning of the deck.

Power up

Every run is its own roguelike upgrade puzzle. Acquire Jokers, wild cards that add to your deck and rewire how your hands score with unique powers. Add chip bonuses to card suits with gems, and to grid cells with inlays. Add bonus multipliers to card ranks with sigils. But buying more upgrades is a tradeoff, because like any other poker game, your money is also your health.

Discover all the jokers

Jokers are wild cards that come with unique powers.  Discover all the unique jokers and buy the ones that help you win against progressively harder curses.

Rotate or fade

No spam allowed. When you control a whole grid of poker hands, Flushes and Straights get easy — so repeating a hand type carries a decaying half-life. Score the same hand twice in a row, and it's worth half as much. Do it again, and it halves again. Play a different hand and the others recover. Variety isn't flavor here; it's how you win.