How to play

The dungeon is 44 cards: a standard deck with the jokers, the red face cards and the red aces taken out. You start with 20 health, and potions can never take you past it. (The difficulty setting raises both to 30 or 40.)

• Skulls and fiends (spades and clubs) are monsters. They hit for their value: 2 to 10, then J 11, Q 12, K 13, A 14.
• Swords (diamonds) are weapons. Taking one equips it at once and throws away your old weapon along with everything it killed.
• Potions (hearts) heal by their value, never past 20, and only one works per room. A second potion in the same room is simply thrown away.

Rooms

Four cards make a room. Face three of them, one at a time, in any order. The fourth stays and becomes part of the next room.

Before you touch anything in a room you may avoid it: all four cards go to the bottom of the dungeon and a fresh room is dealt. You can never avoid two rooms in a row.

Fighting

Bare handed, you take the monster's full value. With your weapon, you take the monster's value minus the weapon's, if anything is left over, and the monster stays on the weapon.

Once a weapon has killed something, it can only be used on monsters no stronger than the last one it killed. It is not lost - it still works on anything weaker. (The settings say whether an equal monster counts.)

Score

Make it through the whole dungeon and your score is your remaining health - plus the potion's value if your last card was a potion and you were at 20. Die, and your score is your health minus every monster left unslain.

Playing here

• Tap a card to take it. When a monster could go either way, you get a choice of weapon or bare hands, with the damage for each.
• Or drag: a monster onto your weapon, or onto your health to fight it bare handed.
• Help, at the top, lists every move open to you right now - what each one does, how often it survives in simulation - and rings the best one on the table.
• The dungeon maps itself on the table behind the cards as you go: every room you have been through and what you met there. Avoiding a room turns you 90 degrees, out through a secret door - the S on the wall, as the old dungeon maps marked them. The map button at the top shows it in full, on paper, with what each card did to you, and can save it as a picture.
• Keys: 1 to 4 pick a card, W weapon, B bare hands, A avoid the room, H help, M map, U undo, N new dungeon.
• Undo works inside the current room. Once the next room is dealt you have seen it, so the last one is settled.

Scoundrel was designed by Zach Gage and Kurt Bieg, 2011.
This version was written for danger.academy, 2026.