Soft 17

The house always wins. Break its rules.

SOFT 17 is a blackjack roguelite. You sit down with a few hundred dollars and climb three floors of a casino that gets meaner the higher you go. Every table asks for a profit in a fixed number of hands. Miss twice and you are thrown out.

You are not playing fair blackjack. You are building a machine.

Your deck is yours.

Between tables you edit the deck you play from. Remove the cards that betray you. Gild one so it pays every time it lands. Make another Flexible, worth three more or three less as the hand needs. The shoe you face is the shoe you built.

Ninety items, one engine

Trinkets that pay on a natural, on a split, on the exact 21. Techniques you fire yourself: look at the next card, send it to the bottom, cash out of a table early. Relics torn off the bosses you beat. They fire in the order you put them in the bag, and that order changes the answer.

Cheating is a real option, and it has a real price

Every technique raises the Heat. The house notices. Prices go up. Then an inspector comes and sits at your table. Then you cannot cheat at all. How far you push it is the whole question.

Four casinos, four real games

Beat the house and it opens a room where blackjack itself is different. Double Exposure, where both dealer cards are face up and ties lose. Spanish 21, where the tens have left the shoe. Blackjack Switch, where you play two hands and trade their second cards. Each one comes with its own bosses, its own room, its own leaderboard.

Never played blackjack? It will teach you.

The dealer walks you through your first table, one idea at a time. After that, the book on the felt tells you the correct play on every hand, in every variant, for as long as you want it there. Turn it off when you no longer need it.

And when you win

Twelve cumulative notches that stack the house's advantages one on top of another. A daily run on a seed everyone in the world plays. A permanent workshop where the shards from every climb, won or lost, buy something that lasts. A table for up to four players over LAN.

Nothing here is on a timer. Every hand waits for you.