All Fours in Ashes

In a cold New England winter, the dead do not rest easy. You are a medium. You call the colonial dead to the table and play them at cards. Win the hand, and you put a restless soul to rest. Lose, and they take their portion of your light.

All Fours in Ashes is a single-player roguelike built on a real nineteenth-century card game: two-handed All Fours, also called Setback or Auction Pitch. Every séance is one tense hand against one of the dead, and your own candle is the stake.

The candle is your life

The candle's wick burns a little lower on its own with every séance. Make your bid and you bank the points. Miss it and you are set back, and the dead take the difference out of your flame. 

Every soul remembers one thing

The forgetting has worn each spirit down to a single memory, and that memory bends the rules of the table. One will not let you trump. One devours your tens. One cannot be beaten at the Jack. Learn what each of the dead does to help put them to rest.

Build a hand of charms

Between hands you draft charms, ghostly favors that reshape how you score, mend your candle, or break a curse. There are dozens of them across five ways to play, but you can only carry a few at a time. Spend embers to hunt for the ones you need, and find the combination that cracks the deepest dark.

Light the candle. Deal the cards. Pay what the dead are owed.