It's out. You can buy Alonitaire from today.
Let me tell you one thing first, because I'd rather say it myself: if you buy it, open it and play the way the game tells you to, what you'll get is an ordinary game of Klondike solitaire. Nothing more than that. During the Next Fest there were people who played it like that for a while and left thinking that was the whole thing. I can't blame them, because that is exactly what it looks like.
It's the game the Joker wants you to play.
How to open Alonitaire
- Start a run and wait for the deal.
- Open the settings menu.
- Set master volume to 1, music to 8 and effects to 4.
- Go back to the board.
This isn't a leak, and it isn't a trick I've invented for the announcement. The game asks you for that same combination in the tutorial, about two minutes in. The problem is that some people never get to the two-minute mark, so I'm leaving it here instead, where he has no say.
He does, of course, have something to say about this.
An announcement. With instructions. I assure you those numbers do absolutely nothing. Sort your cards and go home.
Try it yourself.
What happens when you do
The Sigils turn up. There are twenty-eight of them and they all exist for the same reason, which is to let you do something solitaire won't allow: putting a red card on another red card, going up instead of down, sending the one who's watching to sleep. One of them picks up the whole board and deals it again. With another one you take coins out of the Joker's pocket, and I mean that literally.
He sees all of it, but he won't stop you. He keeps count, which is worse. In the first phase he puts up with four cheats, and on the fifth one he decides what happens to you: the card you cheated with goes to sleep, or the pile freezes, or he shuffles it in front of you, or he drops cards from the deck on top of it. He chooses, not you. The only thing you can do about it is send him to sleep first.
Every card you wake up leaves you a Sigil and also starts talking to you, which you hadn't asked for. Put three Sigils on the Jack of Clubs and a shop opens with all the noise and the lights of a slot machine. And the deck doesn't reset: whatever you walk away with turns up in your next run.
Four things this page says, which I'm going to correct today
If you scroll up a little, in the description, there are four promises with a green tick next to them. He wrote those. Now that the game is out, I'm answering them.
"Sort the cards quietly."
You can do that. You can also drag a card into a space where it doesn't fit and watch it stay there, because it was carrying the right Sigil.
"Follow the rules."
The rules of this game are twenty-eight things you collect so that you can break them.
"Don't ask questions."
I'd almost let him keep this one. Asking is fine. Getting an answer is another matter.
"It's just a game."
Yes, it's a game. It's also what's left of something the two of us started more than ten years ago and then left sitting there, unfinished, for a very long time. Antonio never saw it running. I've finished it. His name is in the credits, and there are quite a few cards that I wrote while I was thinking about him.
You can play it now
It's out with a 20% discount until 14 October. The demo is still up in case you'd rather try it first: the first ten cards and the whole of phase one, with nothing cut out.
And if you do buy it, play it badly. That's the idea.
— Kryon Harts, Ludis Anima Games
I am still here. I am still counting. And you have just read an announcement that asked you to touch the volume on a computer. Congratulations.