The Forces get their own faces

Xenocide had renamed the suits a long time ago. It had not redrawn them. You were reading about the four Forces and then looking down at four ordinary playing-card pips, which is a gap you stop noticing and never stop feeling.

They are drawings now. A heart that bleeds, a diamond with a slit pupil, a club gone to spores, and a spade with a keyhole cut through it.

The constraint I would not break

Every mark keeps its suit’s silhouette.

Suit is the fastest read on a card. You scan eight of them in about a second and you do it by shape, before you have consciously looked at anything. A novel shape costs you that, and it costs it on every single card, forever, in exchange for atmosphere you notice once.

So each mark is the familiar outline with the world done to it, rather than something new.

The small corner index keeps the plain pip, too. At the size you fan a hand by, these drawings are mush, and the corner is the part you actually fan by. Real decks make exactly the same split.

Also in this one

• Title cards. The descent beginning, each tier turning over, and victory. They never block your input: the board stays live behind them, because a card game with a modal between turns is a slideshow.
• Two new skins, drawn from the Weathered Occult deck, with real card stocks rather than tinted ones.