| Arcanum (pl. arcana) | What other deckbuilders call jokers. A small object — rabbit’s foot, chipped tooth, folded draft notice — that fires on a trigger and bends the cascade. Don’t call them jokers. |
| Charm | Synonym for arcanum used in older docs. Both refer to the same thing. |
| Room | What other roguelikes call an “ante”. The night progresses through six rooms. |
| Night | One run. Six rooms, ending in dawn (cleared, with a Piece handed back to you) or last call (the morning is heavier; you shed a charm or two). |
| A week at the table | The 7-night campaign. |
| Tonight’s Hand | The daily seed — same starting deck and room sequence for everyone playing today. |
| Cascade | The 7-step scoring sequence (PipScore → Sticker → HandArchetype → HouseRule → ArcanumAdditive → ArcanumMultiplicative → MercyCapFire → FinalScore). |
| Engine moment | A cascade where 2+ ×mult arcana fire AND chip total ≥ 100. The animator slows down for these. |
| Long-Game Multiplier | Structural rule. Archetype mult × (1 + 0.3 × min(hit_count, 3)). |
| Death’s Hesitation | Structural rule. Bust on J/Q/K → cascade halved instead of zeroed. |
| Mercy cap | The mult ceiling. Can be raised, lowered, or charmed by Mercy arcana. |
| Drawback | An arcanum that imposes a constraint (no double, no split, etc.) for a compensating benefit. Acquired through an explicit “Do you accept the terms?” prompt. |
| Vow | A voluntary constraint chosen at run-start (no double, must stand on 17, etc.). Each vow credits chips back against room targets. |
| Piece | What the dealer hands back when you clear a night. A memory, a year, a name, a face, a season, a song, a habit, a room. Each Piece has a five-line narrative arc that surfaces across the campaign as it settles back into being yours. |
| Last call | A failed night — capital hit zero, or you bust terminally. The dealer takes no Piece; the morning is just heavier. You shed 1-2 charms and the campaign continues. |
| Quiet Morning | The screen the player sees after a last call. Sister to the Recovery screen, but with no Piece handed back. |
| Recovery (screen) | The dawn-screen that shows after a cleared night. The dealer hands back one Piece; the remembrance panel lists the ones you’ve already collected. |
| Bergman fold | Voluntarily folding the final hand. Closes the campaign with the accept_it ending. |
| Courtesy | The dealer’s progression. Tracks runHistory.nightsPlayed. Higher courtesy unlocks more dealer lines and softer registers. |
| Sanity | Resource bar (cap 6 by default). Spent on Refusal (mulligan) and Carry (preserve a card). Refreshes between nights. |
| Refusal | Trade 1 sanity to refuse a dealt card and re-draw. Replaces traditional “mulligan.” |
| Carry | Spend sanity to preserve one card across a hand boundary. |
| Bone Cart | Between-room shop offering small persistent objects (bones). Has its own arcana axis. |
| Apothecary | Between-room shop offering deck-sculpting (add a card, remove a card, etc.). |
| Empty Chair | The dealer’s mechanism for placing a noticed-but-unowned arcanum on the chair every 5th content-run. |
| Hours of the Night | Meta currency. Earned per cleared room, per cleared night, per ending witnessed. Spent in the Book of Hours. |
| Mantle | Cross-campaign tier. Climbs with content runs. |
