Punchcard: A Stand-Up Comedy Deckbuilder

Your deck is your set. The crowd is dead. Literally.

Every night at 7:00 PM you wake up in the dressing room of the Palladium, a vaudeville theatre nobody has booked since 1931. Waiting for you is Gus Velour, a headliner who dropped dead one beat before the best punchline of his life. He has a tour booked for you on the Haunted Circuit: basements, piers, cellars and radio studios that only open after midnight, packed with audiences who haven't laughed in decades.

Get up there. Kill. Wake up and do it again. It's always 7:00 PM.

Build the joke
Every joke card has a beat: Setup, Build or Punchline. Play them in order and the whole chain goes off as one combo, and every card on the beat hits harder than the last. Break the sequence and the room goes quiet. There are no cost ladders and no busywork, just timing.

Loop your set
You start with a six-card set and a tiny pocket of Wit. Draw cards and cheap tricks keep you going around the deck again and again, and the combo grows each lap. Tell the same joke three times in one turn, though, and it wears out until the next one.

Read the room
Every crowd wants something different. Tech Bros, Cruise Ship Seniors, a Bachelorette Party, The Heckler Table. Hecklers hit back, bored rooms tune out, and you can see what they're about to do. Keep your Ego up or the curtain drops early.

Every crowd brings its own room: a basement open mic, a back bar where nobody bought a ticket, a wedding where the DJ is on a break, a sold-out club, and some stages a lot further down.

Tour the Circuit
Each tour is a map of choices: easy gigs, Tough Crowds, rest stops, '?' stops in the dark, and a Headliner ghost who has held their stage for ninety years and isn't giving it up. Hidden doors lead to side stages and keepsakes you won't find anywhere else.

Come back funnier
Bombing isn't the end. Spend Fame to bring the Palladium back to life, wear the keepsakes of dead Circuit legends, and unlock new material by pulling off feats: an eight-card turn, a six-times combo, a flawless set. The Dressing Room is your hub: poke at everything in it.

Something is wrong with this theatre
The Dressing Room has drawers that won't open, a code nobody gave you, and a draft coming from under the rug. Pages turn up on tour that Gus would rather you didn't read. And one of your cards has started talking. Gus doesn't tell you everything.

There's a stage further down
Under the Palladium there's another circuit, and nobody upstairs talks about it. The crowds down there have waited even longer: seat-fillers who were never paid, hecklers who shouted at Lincoln, a telethon that hasn't hit its goal since 1952. Getting in is the hard part.

Five chapters, one unfinished joke
The Haunted Circuit is a full story campaign told between gigs. Play the Basement open mic that never ends, a pier that burned down in 1938 and still runs its summer season, cellar clubs ruled by a Duchess who hasn't laughed since the Depression, radio towers where the signal never died, and finally the Palladium itself, sold out for the first time since 1931.

Finish Gus's joke and get the Last Laugh. Then try it on harder Encore levels, if you dare.

Free demo at Steam Next Fest
Play all of Chapter 1, The Basement, in February 2027. Wishlist Punchcard to hear when the demo goes live and get a ping on launch day. It's the single biggest help to a one-person studio.