Dead Market

Dead Market is a single-player card game about debt. You win a match by taking two of three rounds across three districts, but most ways to win a round are bought on credit. That credit is recorded in a Ledger beside the board, where it remains for the whole match.

The Ledger

The Ledger can hold up to five debt lines, each showing an amount in souls, a timer in turns and sometimes Interest. Both players can read both Ledgers. A timer counts down at the start of its owner's turn, and when a debt comes due, that player must choose to pay or default.

Defaulting is a strategic choice: refusing a small penalty can be worthwhile, and late in a round you are already losing, refusing a large cost can be cheaper. If you take a sixth line while five are open, it is added, but your oldest debt is called in immediately, regardless of its timer.

Five factions

Each faction interacts with debt differently:

• The Red Notaries: put debt lines in your Ledger and profit while they remain there.
• The Grave Sovereigns: use the Tomb as a resource, killing their own units to trigger Last Wills and then buying them back.
• The Candle Children: Seal instead of killing and strike debt lines from Ledgers. They are the only faction that reliably undoes debt.
• The Hungering Deep: consume the fact that anything ever lived, rather than eating the dead. Emptying your deck is a possible win condition, and what they take is gone in a way the Tomb never is.
• The Free Mortals: rely on numbers and refusal, using cheap bodies, wide boards and cards that strike the opponent's Ledger clean out of spite.

Campaign and other modes

The six-act campaign has six bosses, each of whom breaks one rule of the game, and five endings determined by clauses you initialled earlier. The Night Auction is a draft run: you take one card from each lot, then play the night with a file the market lent you. The house keeps a Ledger on you during the run.

The Street of Unpaid Names offers three standing contracts that never expire and three more that are re-papered each day. It has no stamina system or waiting, and nothing is on a timer that requires you to return later. Ranked play has a ladder of nine grades, and a card stall that shows what you are missing rather than what you already have.

Cards and learning

The game contains 247 playable objects, 190 of them collectible, each with its own illustration. A 53-step first lesson teaches the rules over one scripted match, with cards dealt rather than shuffled so each explanation matches what happens shortly afterward.

Rules and accessibility

A 26-section player's guide is generated from the rules themselves. Round ends explain each effect that fired, one at a time, and mark where it happened; a line beneath the board always answers why something happened.

Accessibility options include colour-vision profiles, high contrast, UI scaling, large card text, reduced motion, screen-shake and flashing toggles, subtitles, sound-effect captions, mono audio, high-frequency reduction and night mode. There are seven separate volume buses, and information is conveyed through more than one channel.