The Lien table
The wanderer has a card game of his own now, played with one standard deck and a pile of chips, and a table in the juke joint where he deals it. The rules are simulated and the table is built. Nobody has checked it by hand yet.
On September 16 The Lien became the game's subtitle, replacing Come Due. The note that records the choice keeps the argument against it. A lien is a condition rather than an event, and it is the one word in this project that comes from the statute book rather than from somebody's mouth. That last part is the point, since every other name here is a word somebody who lives there would say. The title is the creditor's word, and it is the thing being done to them.
Nine days later I asked for the setting's own card game on a standard deck, "like Magic the Gathering a bit but with poker cards." It is called Lien. In it your chips are your life. What the other player takes from you sits in front of them in a take pile, and a heart wins chips back only out of that pile. You lose when your stack and your take pile are both empty, and the rules call that broke.
One deck and a pile of chips
It must be playable on a real table with one deck and chips, with no hidden counters and no sums too big for your head. Every rule has to do a job nothing else does and touch the other parts, because a rule that stands alone is decoration. And the engine depends on nothing in the game except its playing card, so it could lift out whole.
Each suit has a job. Spades take, clubs guard, hearts win back and diamonds raise the next take, guard or win back. A jack, queen or king played alone stands on the table and works for its suit every turn, and only one of each rank can be out at once, yours or theirs. You can hold up to three cards face down and later cash a chain built from them, where each card matches the one before by suit or rank, and the first card's value times the chain's length is what its suit does.
The numbers were wrong first
The engine went in on September 26 with 47 pure tests. Then a simulation harness played four opponent styles against each other on the real engine, 32,000 sittings. At the first numbers, drawing two cards a turn with 60 chips each, the Builder won 84% of its sittings, because hands refilled fast enough to feed five card chains off one held card. Drawing one was the only knob of seven that ended it, and 50 chips pulled the sitting length back toward target. I also changed what a face card does in a chain. A king could lead a spade chain for 13 times its length and then stand on the board taking five a turn, one card doing two jobs, so now no face card in a chain comes into play. Under the shipped rules no style dominates. The strongest wins 58.2%, and the median sitting runs 15.5 turns each, at the top edge of the target. A first turn draw for the first player was measured too and not taken, since it overshot.
The table
The table was built overnight. You buy it once in the Hoodoo shop with silver dimes, and it stands at the front of the act 1 joint beside twenty-one, tonk, skin, hold'em once bought, and a table that opens after you lose a run. The wanderer deals there.
His challenger is someone in the room who is not dealing this visit, each with a style you can learn. Earl plays like a turtle. Hattie Mae Pruitt builds. Pleasant Hawkins works the board. The drifting enemies who sit at tables are takers. You build a chain by clicking cards in order, and a line under your hand shows the sum as it grows.
The save records who has sat down at his table and whom he has beaten there. Nothing reads either list yet. They are hooks for lore and a future companion.
What is not done
The table is built and tested, and its twelve checks by hand are owed. Conversations at the table, a recurring rival, the juke upgrade shop the table will move into, and modifiers you could collect between sittings are not built, and each waits on a design of its own.