Dead Market

About the Game

The market will lend you anything. It writes all of it down.

Dead Market is a card game about debt. You win a match by taking two of three rounds across three districts — but almost everything that wins a round is bought on credit, and the credit goes into a book that sits beside the board

for the whole match.

The Ledger is the second board. Up to five lines, each with an amount in souls, a timer in turns, and sometimes Interest. Both players can read both books. The timer counts down at the start of your turn and nobody else's, and

when a line comes due you either pay it or default.

Defaulting is a move, not a mistake. Sometimes it is the correct one: against a small penalty it is often right to refuse, and against a large cost late in a round you are already losing, refusing is simply cheaper. The game is built around that decision being genuinely open. 

And the book has a floor under it. Take a sixth line while five are open and the line still goes in — but your oldest debt is called in that instant, whatever its timer said. A full Ledger is a loaded gun, and it is the most common way a new player loses a round they thought they had won.

Five factions, and each one uses the book differently

The Red Notaries — debt as a weapon. They put lines in your book and profit from them being there.

The Grave Sovereigns — the Tomb is a resource. They kill their own units to trigger Last Wills, then buy them back. Killing their units is doing them a favour.

The Candle Children — they Seal instead of killing, and they strike lines out of Ledgers. The only faction that reliably undoes debt.

The Hungering Deep — they do not eat the dead. They eat that anything ever lived. Emptying your deck is a real win condition, and what they take is gone in a way the Tomb never is.

The Free Mortals — numbers and refusal. Cheap bodies, wide boards, and cards that strike the opponent's book clean out of spite.

What is in it

• 247 playable objects, 190 of them collectible, every one with its ownillustration.

• A six-act campaign with six bosses who each break one rule of thegame, and five endings that depend on clauses you initialled hours earlier.

• The Night Auction — a draft run. Lots come up, you take one card fromeach, and then you play the night out with a file the market lent you. Thehouse keeps a book on you while you do it.

• The Street of Unpaid Names — three standing contracts that neverexpire, and three more re-papered every day. No stamina. No waiting. Nothinghere is on a clock you have to come back for.

• A ranked ladder of nine grades, and a card stall that opens on whatyou are missing rather than on what you have.

• A first lesson that actually teaches: 53 steps over one scriptedmatch, dealt rather than shuffled, so every sentence it tells you is true twominutes later.

It explains itself

A player's guide of 26 sections that is generated against the rules themselves, so it cannot drift from them. A round end that reads itself out — every effect that fired, one at a time, ringed where it happened. And a line under the board

at all times answering "why did that just happen?".

Accessibility

Colour-vision profiles, high contrast, UI scaling, large card text, reduced motion, screen-shake and flashing toggles, subtitles, sound-effect captions, mono audio, a high-frequency reduction and a night mode. Seven separate volume

buses. Everything that carries meaning carries it in more than one channel.

No account, no network, no telemetry

It is a single-player game. It collects nothing and sends nothing anywhere.