Harsh Shadows
plays_count: 0
player_rating: 0
frequent_players: []
history: []
🎯 The Goal
Chase down a villainous, evasive super-spy through a $3\times3$ grid of clandestine locations, gathering enough concrete evidence to make a successful final arrest before the spy slips away or a single piece of reasonable doubt blows your entire case.
⚙️ Core Actions
The game is a solo deduction and positioning race managed through simple card decks and a location grid:
- Navigate the Grid: Move your agent exactly one space in any direction (orthogonal or diagonal) to visit undercover locations, each offering a unique one-shot utility ability.
- Uncover Hidden Clues: Pick up face-down Discovery cards left at your location. These grant vital Clue icons, specific pieces of evidence, or hidden Bombs that force you to instantly discard valuable cards from your hand.
- Unravel the Evidence Piles: Trade in sets of collected Clue icons to peek at cards stashed in three face-down piles—Evidence, False Leads, and a single game-losing Red Herring. You can never afford to look at all of them, so you must carefully deduce what you need.
- Predict AI Spy Movements: Flip the top card of the spy’s movement deck after your turn. The spy shifts spaces based on a strict directional hierarchy printed on the card; if the spy crosses your path or double-backs onto a location, they trigger hand discards and spawn more local obstacles.
- Corner the Target: Plant active wiretap Bugs to preview the spy’s upcoming moves. Once you know their route, use location abilities to trap them in a secure zone, move into their space, and issue your final accusation. To win, you must hold all 3 true Evidence cards and not be holding the Red Herring.
🧠 Why you’ll like it
It is a brilliant, highly portable spy thriller packed into a tiny footprint that feels like a micro-version of Scotland Yard. The mechanical tension of the hidden Red Herring card is fantastic—it forces you to constantly balance the risk of making a fast, premature accusation against spending too much time digging for clues while the spy slips through your fingers. It provides a fast, satisfyingly algorithmic deduction puzzle perfect for solo gamers.
Welcome to the Reckoning
plays_count: 0
player_rating: 0
frequent_players: []
history: []
🎯 The Goal
Lead your desperate Wild West posse through a small mining town corrupted by an apocalyptic, time-warping substance called “Dust,” outmaneuvering spectral monsters and raging fires to assemble a winning poker hand and buy your ticket out of town.
⚙️ Core Actions
The game is a tight, sequential survival puzzle played directly against an escalating event track:
- Walk the Event Row: Each round, deal five Event cards face up into a linear timeline. You must march your Character card down the row from left to right, resolving every single positive, neutral, or painful effect on a card one by one.
- Consume Chrono-Dust: Spend collected Dust cards from your reserve to bend time rules before an event resolves. Dust allows you to instantly purge horrific monster Riders, banish deep-space Tentacles from locations, or draw emergency cards.
- Manage Internal Corruption: Every piece of Dust you consume is moved to your personal Corruption pile. If your accumulated Corruption ever exceeds your character’s strict Willpower limit, you instantly lose your mind to the town’s madness and fail the game.
- Discard to Scavenge Buildings: Discard any card from your hand once per round to physically visit one of the town’s four double-sided locations (like the Saloon, Church, or Mine). Visiting activates powerful building actions, but you are blocked if the structure is currently overrun by Tentacles or engulfed in fire.
- Survive the Fire Clean-up: At the end of the round, check the town’s state. If even a single building is left burning on the board, you automatically suffer permanent Health damage before moving to the next round.
- Catch the Escape Wagon: The unique Escape Wagon card is shuffled deep into the event deck. When it is revealed, you must immediately discard your remaining hand to purchase your seats using the values of a valid poker hand assembled across the game.
🧠 Why you’ll like it
It takes a gritty, supernatural Weird West theme and straps it to a completely unique poker-building tactical puzzle. The resource loop is wonderfully stressful: using the magical Dust gives you a god-like ability to rewrite terrible cards and skip disasters, but it ticks you closer to a permanent sanity game-over. It is an intense, narrative-heavy solo card game where managing structural fires, monster placement, and your own internal decay keeps you on a knife’s edge until the final wagon pulls up.