About This Demo

Arcanum Solitarius is poker solitaire with an arcane twist. This free demo is the opening of the game.

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. 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.

What's in the demo

The demo is Level I, antes 1 through 3 — the complete core loop, start to finish, with nothing locked off inside it. You draft from 23 of the game's Jokers, upgrade your deck and board in the marketplace between rounds, and face a boss round at the end of every ante: The Magician I, The High Priestess II, and finally The Empress III. The demo ends when the Empress does. There is no time limit and no ask before you play.

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

The Arcana of The Fool's Journey arrive cursed: corrupted tarot cards that warp the playing rules and inflict scoring penalties. You meet them in boss rounds, and they don't leave on their own — purify a curse or it keeps taxing every round that follows. The demo's three are only the beginning of the deck.

Power up

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. 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.

The full game

If the Empress sends you back for another run, the full Arcanum Solitarius is what the demo is the front of: three Levels instead of one, all 37 Jokers, and the whole 22-card Major Arcana to meet and purify. Wishlist it on the store page linked above — it's the single most useful thing you can do for a game built this way, and it's how you'll hear when it's out.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

All the art in Arcanum Solitarius, from the playing cards to the Arcana and the workshop backgrounds, was made with AI image generation using a model I trained myself. I was after one specific look: a medieval alchemist's workshop by candlelight, in aged parchment and dark walnut with verdigris and old gold. Most of the music was made the same way. I used AI to draft some of the in-game writing, then rewrote it into my own words. I picked and edited every piece before it went into the game, and the images on this page come from those same assets. Nothing is generated while you play.