claudium
card idle · free · browser

Card Idle

A dark fantasy idle deckbuilder. Most idle games ask you to buy a bigger number. This one asks you where to put things. Nine slots, 113 cards, and every card changes the ones beside it.

A full Card Idle board: nine painted cards including The Volcano, The Necromancer and The King, with the collection open beside it.
Nine slots, forever. No expansions, no second grid — the board you get on the first minute is the board you get on the last.

how it plays

Rearranging is the game. The number in the corner is just the score.

Every card argues with its neighbours

A Candle Stub lifts whatever it touches. A Miser's Curse drags its neighbours down. A Ley Line pushes its whole row. The Weeping Saint takes a curse aimed at the card beside it and turns it into a blessing instead. Nine slots is not many, and that is the point.

Cards that do more than add up

The Old Oak pays you for leaving it alone and resets the moment you move it. The Black Mirror copies whatever your best card earns. The Volcano summons Fissures into its own row. Three cards make you choose what they do when you put them down — and let you change your mind later.

Sixteen tags that read each other

Beasts, relics, crooked officials, standing stones, things in jars. A board of Farms plays nothing like a board of Cursed. Challenges ask you to fill every slot with a single tag and hit a rate; clear one and that tag is permanently stronger, and they stack.

Prestige when the board runs dry

Wipe everything and keep the points. They buy upgrades that never stop scaling, and prestige packs — the only place the rarest cards live.

It idles properly

Earns while the tab is shut, up to eight hours. Saves as you go. No account, no ads, nothing to buy.


the maths, shown

Nothing is hidden from you.

Hover any card and it shows its own working: what it earns on its own, what each neighbour is adding or taking away, and what it is worth as it currently sits. A board that surprises you is a board you can take apart.

A tooltip over The Bell Tower breaking its output down line by line — base rate, prestige bonus, and the cards lighting it.

The Card Idle collection: rows of hand-assembled card art, with the ones not yet owned shown as empty frames.
the collection

113 cards.

Thirty-two common, thirty-five rare, twenty-three epic, eighteen legendary, and five that only ever come out of a prestige pack. The ones you have not found yet sit in the grid as empty frames, which is its own kind of pressure.

32 common 35 rare 23 epic 18 legendary 5 prestige

packs

One card at a time.

Packs get more expensive as you open them, so the run is a steady negotiation between buying the next one and letting the board earn a while longer. A card you already own comes back as a spare, and spares are what level it up — nothing is ever wasted.

The Card Idle shop, showing the pack price and the drop rate for each rarity.

The challenges panel: a list of tags, each with progress pips and a permanent bonus for clearing it.
challenges

Forty-eight reasons to rebuild.

Fill the board with one tag, reach the rate, and that tag is stronger for good. Arcane, Beast, Coin, Craft, Criminal, Cursed, Earth, Farm, Guard, Light, Nature, Relic, Royal, Structure, Trade, Treasure — each with three tiers, and the bonuses stack.


PlatformBrowser — nothing to install, click and play
PriceFree. No account, no ads, nothing to buy
Cards113, across five rarities · 16 tags · 6 summon tokens
OfflineEarns with the tab shut, up to eight hours
SavesIn your own browser
StatusIn development — playable end to end, balance still being tuned
Built withClaudium Engine
A note on AI. The card art, the frames and the UI textures are AI-generated, then cropped, keyed, colour-matched and assembled by hand. The code was written with an AI assistant, directed and reviewed by Ken; the design, the card mechanics and every balance decision are his. The music is not generated — it is synthesised live in your browser, written by hand, and there is no music file. The fonts are Alegreya and Monocraft, both open source. If AI art is a dealbreaker for you, better you know before clicking play than after.