Lockwork

A single-player sequencing puzzle: turn a vault dial to a hidden combination by playing cards one at a time from a standard 52-card deck. Land inside the tolerance band and call it — trip the alarm and the crack fails. A run is a night's work: eight vaults, one crew, and no way to buy back a mistake.

1 player (solo).

One standard 52-card French-suited deck (Ace low through King high). The crew you take changes what that deck starts as — see The Briefing below.

Every run opens on a briefing: pick the crew you are taking and how hard the vaults will push back. Nothing is committed until you take a crew, so the Heat can be set and reset first.

Heat is the difficulty tier, I through V. Each tier above the first:

Heat also pays. It deepens the standing Cut on every dial, and on top of that it multiplies your score — ×1 at Heat I, rising to ×3 at Heat V. Cut itself is never multiplied, so a hot run is a scoring choice and not a way to get rich at the Fence. Each tier keeps its own record.

So Heat squeezes a run from both ends — a smaller target to hit, and less bought help to hit it with — and pays you for surviving it. Clearing a run unlocks the tier above it; Heat I and The Old Firm are always available.

You hold five cards, and the deck refills the hand one card at a time as you play. You are choosing from a rolling window, never from your whole deck at once — so the deck you build is the thing feeding you mid-crack, not just the thing that set your opening hand.

A tool you spend is replaced the same way. The deck itself is the crack's outer clock: play long enough and it runs dry, the hand runs down, and the crack ends.

The dial starts at 0. Every card you play adds a signed amount to the dial:

Going under the target is free. Going over is where the danger lives.

Cards you play form the line, in order. Each card links to the card immediately before it:

Only one link can fire per card — if a card would qualify for more than one, the higher multiplier wins. Ties break Twin, then Smooth, then the crew links in rail order, leftmost slot first: a crew ability can never be quietly outranked by a weaker built-in link. A Crowbar is not a link of its own and never competes — it only lends a ×2 to a card that had nothing.

The link multiplier is applied before the colour sign, so a tripled red King subtracts 39 from the dial, not 13.

The dial reading falls into one of four zones:

Every dial has a par — roughly one turn of the dial for every ten of the combination number, never fewer than three. Turn the dial past par and the alarm line comes down by one for every further card you play, tools included.

It stops one step above the band. At that point there is no danger zone left at all: you are either on the number or you are caught.

This is the clock inside the crack. Early turns are free; every turn after par costs you room.

Once the dial is inside the band, Call It becomes available. Calling it cracks that dial and pays you the Cut — every dial pays, so a three-dial vault pays three separate times.

The Cut for a dial is built from three things:

That last one is the decision the game is built around. A card that links keeps the chain and multiplies its own contribution; a card that lands you exactly on the number may break it. Playing one more card to keep a chain alive is how you earn, and every card past par is a step of the guard's patience you are spending to do it.

A card slipped face down links to nothing, so it breaks the chain. So does starting a new dial.

Opening the vault is a separate event. It ends the job and sends you to the Fence, but it pays nothing by itself — the Cut came from the dials.

Cut is what you spend at the Fence. Score is the total Cut you have earned across the whole run, whether or not you spent it, so buying something never costs you score.

Between jobs the Fence opens. Its stock is drawn from a shuffled supply under the run's seed, so the same run replays identically. It sells:

You may leave the Fence at any time, including with everything unspent. Nothing is forced, and an item you cannot afford simply cannot be picked.

Burning is deliberately cheap and always available. It is how you keep the deck sharp — and how you get a tool back out of a deck that has too many of them.

Gear are cards. They shuffle into your deck, stay there for the rest of the run, and are dealt into hands like any other card. Gear contributes 0 to the dial and never enters the line, so spending a tool can neither bust the dial nor break a chain — the next playing card still links to the last playing card.

A Wax Impression's second resolution repeats the first exactly. It does not re-evaluate links, and the card never links to itself — a 4♥ played under one with no link subtracts 4, then subtracts 4 again. A Crowbar, Chalk, Mirror or Wax Impression is armed for the next card only, whether or not it had anything to catch.

Your deck will hold at most 8 tools. Past that the Fence will not sell you another, because a deck of tools is a deck that cannot turn the dial.

Every crew member bends one number:

The order the numbers land in. A card's value is settled first — Motion Sensor silences a face card, then Chalk doubles it, then the Muscle doubles it again on the first card of the line. The link multiplies that. The colour then decides the direction, and a Mirror flips it. Only then do the red adjustments land: Sticky Dial halves a red magnitude before the Electrician doubles it, so on an even magnitude the two cancel exactly and on an odd one you lose the rounding. A Wax Impression applies the finished number twice.

The Inside Man's +10 adds to Guard Rotation's offset rather than replacing it, so a dial can start at 18. The Cat's face-down card is link-opaque, not link-transparent: the next card links to it in the ordinary way, so it dumps a card without protecting a chain.

A run is eight jobs. Each job is a vault whose combination has a growing number of dials, turned in sequence — a bigger vault simply has a longer combination:

Each dial is its own crack: its own combination number, its own band, its own alarm line, and its own fresh hand. Every dial of a job must be turned before the vault opens. Opening the vault ends the job and starts the next one.

Across the run the combination numbers climb, the bands narrow, and the gap between the band and the alarm line shrinks.

Opening the eighth vault wins the run — and the night does not stop there. Play continues, job 9, job 10 and on, purely for score. The combination keeps climbing while the band sits on its floor of ±1 and the gap on its floor of 2, so every further vault is harder than the last and there is no ceiling.

A won run can therefore end two ways: Retire at the Fence and walk away with the score you have, or push on until the last crew member takes the fall. Either way the run is already a win — the eighth vault settled that. Retire only appears once the run is won.

From job 2 onwards, every job carries one security complication that bends a rule for the whole job. Job 1 always runs clean.

Each complication is drawn from a shuffled supply, so a run never faces the same order twice. Once all eight have been served they are shuffled back in and drawn again.

The crack fails if:

Running out of cards with the dial sitting inside the band is not a failure — you can still Call It.

When a crack fails:

You have room for five crew, and the run opens with two, three or four depending on the loadout you took. Crew you started with were never recruited, so they refund nothing when they take the fall — whichever loadout brought them.

There is no opponent and no turn limit. On each move you either:

Clean House and Featherweight pull in opposite directions from the same win: one asks you never to spend a life, the other asks you to burn the deck down to a third of its starting size — and burning costs Cut you would otherwise have spent on the crew keeping you alive.