Getting started

Where to play

• Web demo (single night): palejack.com. Plays one night start-to-finish, no install. Cached as a PWA after first load — works offline.
• Desktop campaign (7-night): Download from the project releases page. Native macOS / Windows / Linux. The demo is the campaign’s Night 1 — every other night happens only here.

The two builds share the same engine. The web build is gated by a build flag (kCampaignMode = false) and shows the demo path; the desktop build flips the flag and unlocks Player Name Entry → seven nights → recovery / quiet-morning / dawn cycles.

Your first night

You are at a back-room table. The dealer pours you coffee. You have 250 chips, 6 sanity, and 6 rooms to get through before dawn. Each room raises a house rule — the last room is dealt by Pale Jack himself.

The mechanics are real blackjack: hit, stand, double, split, surrender, dealer hits soft 17. We bend rules through arcana, vows, and house rules — we don’t break them as the baseline.

What’s different from blackjack

• Charms (arcana). Up to 5 small objects you carry. Each one fires on a specific trigger and bends the cascade. See Arcana → Overview.
• Cascade scoring. Wins don’t just pay chips — they pay a score (chips × mult) that the room’s target compares against. See Mechanics → Cascade.
• The Long-Game Multiplier. Every hit you take past the second card scales your archetype mult by 1.3 / 1.6 / 1.9. Hitting on hard 15 isn’t always wrong. See Long-Game Multiplier.
• Death’s Hesitation. Bust on a face card (J/Q/K)? The cascade is halved instead of zeroed. See Death’s Hesitation.
• Vows. Stack 1–5 voluntary constraints at start (no double, no split, no surrender, etc.). Each one credits you back chips against the room targets.
• The dealer talks. He has a 700+ line corpus, indexed against room, hand outcome, courtesy, campaign night. He calls you by name from Night 2 onward. He never breaks frame.

Controls

• Tap to deal, hit, stand, double, split, surrender. The action bar at the bottom shows what’s legal at each phase.
• DECK chip in the status strip — view your draw pile.
• TRAY — your active arcana.
• BOOK (start screen) — the Book of Hours. Pages unlock as you clear rooms, recover pieces, witness endings.
• LEDGER — your run history.

What to expect on Nights 2 through 7

Night	Day	Beat
1	Sunday	First sit-down. Dealer is friendly but does not name you.
2	Monday	He calls you by your name.
3	Tuesday	”We’re practically familiars.”
4	Wednesday	The midweek thinning.
4½	—	The Act Break (one beat per campaign).
5	Thursday	The lamp dims one notch.
6	Friday	He’s been keeping count.
7	Saturday	He sits on this side of the table.

Clear a night → he hands back a Piece (a memory, a year, a name) and you advance into a kinder morning. Lose a night → no Piece moves either way; you shed a charm or two and walk into a quieter morning. Lose seven → the campaign closes with the last_call_final ending. Clear seven → pay_debt. Fold the final hand voluntarily → accept_it.