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

Your life is a candle, the Wick, and it burns a little lower on its own with every séance. You bid for points, and you must reach what you bid. 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. Bid low and you gutter out slowly. Bid high and make it, and you climb. There is no safe game.

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 has kept, and turn it against them.

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.

A story with a bottom

This is not an endless loop. There is something at the end of the descent, and a reason you cannot stop going down. Lay the dead to rest, and the séance will ask of you the one thing a medium should never give.

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