Arcanum Solitarius

Arcanum Solitarius is poker solitaire with an arcane twist.

Build a 5x5 grid of poker hands, one card at a time. Draw a card from the deck and drop it into any open space on the grid. When a row or column fills with five cards, it scores immediately, earning the value of the poker hand it contains. The cards that made the hand vanish; the ones that didn't — your kickers — stay behind. Reach the target score before the deck runs out to win the round.

Poker in 2 dimensions

Every card you place belongs to two hands at once — the row it sits in and the column it crosses. You're building five hands across and five down at the same time, and each placement decides which line a card serves and what it costs the other. Cards come one at a time, so you're always working with what the deck gives you, not what your plan wanted. You set out to build a Royal Flush and settle for Two Pair.

Break the curses

Discover the cursed Arcana of The Fool's Journey: corrupted tarot cards that warp the playing rules and inflict scoring penalties. You face them in boss rounds. Purify them, or they pile up and keep penalizing every round that follows. Meet all 22 of the Major Arcana.

Power up

Build up your deck and playing board. Every run is its own roguelike upgrade puzzle. Acquire Jokers, wild cards that add to your deck and rewire how your hands score with unique powers. Assemble from an exotic roster of 37 different Jokers. Add chip bonuses to card suits with gems, and to grid cells with inlays. Add bonus multipliers to card ranks with sigils. But buying more upgrades is a tradeoff, because like any other poker game, your money is also your health.

Rotate or fade

No spam allowed. When you control a whole grid of poker hands, Flushes and Straights get easy — so repeating a hand type carries a decaying half-life. Score the same hand twice running and it's worth half as much. Do it again and it halves again. Play a different hand and the others recover. Variety isn't flavor here; it's how you win.