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Pale Jack

A back-room table at 2am. The dealer is fond of you. He has been at this table longer than the wallpaper.

This wiki is the working document for Pale Jack — a solo-dev indie horror deckbuilder shaped like blackjack. Players, testers, and contributors land here.

Pale Jack is a 7-night campaign at a back-room blackjack table. The dealer is Death, but he is not cruel — he is fond, exact, and a little exasperated by the cosmic arrangement he is required to uphold. You play seven nights; he hands back a small piece of you each night you walk out clean — a memory, a year, a name. He has been keeping them for you. He calls you by your name from the second night onward. He remembers what you almost said.

  • Mechanics — how the cascade works, the Long-Game Multiplier, Death’s Hesitation, the Mercy cap.
  • Arcana — the 109-charm catalog, organized by build identity.
  • Campaign — a week at the table, the Pieces system, the endings.
  • Voice — how the dealer speaks, and how the corpus is structured.
  • Contributing — how to file bugs, propose new arcana, or write dealer lines.

The single-night demo is live at palejack.com. The full 7-night campaign ships with the desktop build. See Project status for the current progress against the v1.0 spec.

This wiki is written in the same register as the dealer: warm, faintly fussy, never campy. If a page reads as a sales pitch, file a PR.