Crypt Crawl

Crypt Crawl is a solo Scoundrel-style dungeon-crawl card game, played with a single 44-card deck reskinned in Crypties NFT art. No party, no dice - just the deck, your HP, and whatever crypt turns up next. Every one of the 44 cards is hand-assigned to a specific Crypties NFT (from the Crypties - Season 2 collection) rather than drawn from a shuffled art pool - the highest-ranking enemy cards use the rarest pieces the owner holds.

Crypt Crawl is two separate pages. cryptcrawlgame.php is the public marketing page you land on from the site nav or homepage - a standalone page (no site nav), same treatment as Skull Swap and Monstrocity: hero, feature highlights, two counter-scrolling rows showing every Crypties NFT actually used as card art, mechanics/tips/FAQ, and a "Start Crawl" button that starts a real crawl on cryptcrawl.php, ending in a footer (same style as Skull Swap's own) - it's the front door, not a page you need an escape hatch from. cryptcrawl.php is the game itself, and unlike the marketing page it's a normal in-platform page with the regular site nav (same as Missions, Dashboard, or any other staking page) - a simple rules prompt if you don't have a crawl going, the live board while one's in progress, and a result screen (win/loss, crypts cleared, CARBON earned) once it ends, with a "Crawl Again" button. See skullpaper/MAINTENANCE.md for why it's a normal nav'd page rather than standalone - that was tried and reverted.

The Deck

44 cards, three kinds:

♦ Diamonds (2-10) are weapons. Equip one and it stays equipped until you use it - there's only ever one weapon at a time.
♥ Hearts (2-10) are medkits. They heal you.
♣♠ Clubs & Spades (2-14, Ace high) are enemies. Fight them bare-handed or with your weapon. Each enemy suit is themed around one animal skull - Clubs are Cursed Ape, Spades are Cursed Ram - and every Ace/King/Queen/Jack in both suits is one of the collection's rarest WTF-tier pieces, each carrying its own bespoke name (Boombox, Horny, Mardi Gras, Static, Chimera) instead of the suit's default. The 10s in both suits are Cursed Tiger, a guest card from the collection's only two Mythic-tier pieces.

A Crypt (Room)

Four cards face up at a time:

Resolve any 3 of the 4 and the last one carries into the next crypt alongside 3 fresh cards.
Fight an enemy bare-handed and take its full rank in damage, or spend your equipped weapon and take only the difference between the enemy's rank and the weapon's power.
A weapon degrades the moment it's used: it can only be used again on an enemy at or below the rank of the one it just fought.
Use a medkit and heal by its rank. The first one you use in a crypt heals in full; any more after that in the same crypt still heal, just for half (rounded down, minimum 1) - so hoarding several in one crypt is never a total waste, just a worse trade than spacing them out.
Flee a crypt you haven't touched yet (not twice in a row) to reshuffle all 4 cards back into the deck and draw a fresh crypt.

Strategy Tips

Wisdom distilled from the game's own Discord community, not just house-written:

Save your weapon for the fight that needs it. It only degrades further once you use it - a fresh weapon spent on a weak enemy is a wasted edge later.
Don't burn every medkit in one crypt. Only the first heals in full; spacing them across crypts is worth more than hoarding them into one.
Take out tough enemies while you still can. Avoiding a dangerous Club or Spade doesn't make it go away - it's still in the deck, waiting for a moment when you're weaker. Clear it while you can actually afford to.
Fighting bare-handed on purpose is a real move. Taking the HP hit instead of spending your weapon on an enemy it could still beat isn't a mistake - it keeps your weapon's shrinking range open for something worse.

Last Stand

The first hit that would take you to 0 HP in a crawl doesn't - it leaves you standing at 1 HP instead. This happens automatically, once per crawl, whether you're fighting bare-handed or with a weapon. It's the one guaranteed save for a genuinely bad stretch (weapon worn out, flee already spent, a run of big enemies back to back) - after that one save, the next lethal hit ends the crawl for real.

Winning & Losing

Clear the entire 44-card deck to win the crawl.
Run out of HP (after Last Stand is spent) and the crawl ends in a loss.
Giving up mid-crawl counts as a loss too - there's no separate "abandoned" outcome.

CARBON Per Crawl

Every card you resolve - a weapon equipped, a medkit used, an enemy fought, win or lose - earns 10x its own rank in CARBON, stacking up over the whole crawl. A running total is visible right in the HUD as you play, and the moment your crawl ends (cleared, died, or abandoned), the total is credited straight to your balance with a matching transaction and shown again on the game_over screen. Logged-in players only - a guest's crawl still tracks the same total internally, but neither the HUD nor the result screen shows it, since there's no account to actually pay it into.

Leaderboard & Rewards

Every completed crawl (won or lost - an in-progress one doesn't count yet) feeds the Crypt Crawl leaderboard, ranked by wins first, then your best single crawl's crypt depth, then fewest losses. See Leaderboards.

All-Time shows your career totals.
Weekly resets each cycle and pays out - the 1st place finisher earns 50,000 CARBON (= 500 DIAMOND), and the pool divides down the rankings from there (each rank gets roughly its share of the pool, same distribution Gauntlets uses for its own weekly pool). Convertible to DIAMOND at 100:1 - see Crafting.

Every completed crawl also counts toward the platform's Activity leaderboards (all-time, monthly, and weekly) - see Leaderboards.

Every crawl you finish while logged in - cleared or not - also posts a quick result to the Crypt Crawl Discord channel: how deep you got, illustrated with the theme art for the crypt you reached, the CARBON you earned that crawl, plus a callout if it's a new personal best or puts you in 1st place (all-time and/or this week).

Ambience

A small music player sits below the buttons on every screen - play/pause and prev/next controls cycling between the theme song and its reprise, plus a volume slider (starts at 50%, since the tracks are mixed loud). It's on by default; your on/off choice, current track, playback position, and volume stick for the rest of your browser session. Actions themselves no longer reload the page either - fighting, healing, fleeing, all of it updates in place - so the music just keeps playing straight through a crawl instead of restarting.

The music also reacts to how the crawl is actually going, automatically: score a win and Triumph plays; die and it's Death instead. Land in a crypt where every enemy still standing would force your Last Stand no matter how well you play it, and the music turns Frantic; if Last Stand is already spent and that's still true, it turns to Doom - there's no safety net left. None of these four are reachable through prev/next - the only way to hear Triumph is to actually win. All of these transitions crossfade smoothly into each other rather than cutting off - handy if you're darting in and out of Frantic. Manually skipping tracks yourself with prev/next is still an instant switch, on purpose.

The crypt's own backdrop art slowly drifts and zooms while music is playing too - a different pan direction and pace every time, so it never settles into one predictable pattern. It's on by default so you notice it, with a 🎥 button on the player to turn it off if it's more distracting than atmospheric.

A 🔔 button on the player also lets you turn off the pop-up notices for fleeing, medkits, and Last Stand specifically - handy once you know what they say and just want them out of the way. Everything else (like the Abandon Run confirmation) still shows regardless.

Playing as a Guest

Crypt Crawl is playable logged out - a guest's crawl lives in their browser session only and is gone once that session ends, so it never reaches the leaderboard or earns a reward. Log in to have your crawls saved to your account and counted toward both leaderboards.