Carte Blanche

Carte Blanche is one of – if not the – most pleasant games I’ve ever played. It’s “cozy” in a way that modern “cozy games” are not. It makes you think about playing cribbage with your grandpa and trying to get that impossible 19-point hand, before he went to clean fish for hours in his big basement sink for the family fish fry. So much mac and cheese, made from scratch, in the biggest pot you’ve ever seen as a child. You’re not sure how your grandparents had so many friends, but they’d all show up for walleye day. A pot of coffee was always brewed and ready for guests.

You remember playing Kings in the Corner with your great grandma before she regaled the family with her accordion. I’ve never known anyone else that could play the accordion. When she died, I told my mom that was the one thing I wanted. I hope it’s still hiding in my parents’ house somewhere. I haven’t seen it since.

I remember learning card magic and other silly tricks with one of those beginner magic sets. I could make quarters disappear, and aces appear at the top of piles, and move a knot from one rope to another. Carte Blanche transports me back to a simpler time, before social media and the internet, when I didn’t have to worry about anything outside of my little bubble.

Now I can sit here on a Sunday afternoon and just play card games on my Playdate for a while, and I think about playing cards with people who aren’t around anymore. It’s nice to remember.

Carte Blanche is a Playdate game by a husband and wife team that contains five different card games: Cribbage, Spite & Malice, Spades, Gin Rummy, and Cassino. If you haven’t heard of any or all of these (or, like me, just forgot how to play after so many years), then the little raven Blanche will teach you how to play in a patient, straightforward manner. Just a few minutes of explanation and you can jump right in.

Each game is a two-player version even though in real life you can have more players for some of these, and it’s always just you against Blanche. There’s a lot of luck in card games, but the levels of strategy in all five of these games makes you really feel like you’re getting better from one game to the next. What card do you discard? What cards should you keep? How much should you bid? Blanche does a great job of giving you the rules and letting you explore the winning strategies for yourself, although she will help a little.

There was another Cribbage game released recently on the Playdate: Andy Presents: Cribbage. But that one, of course, is just Cribbage, and doesn’t contain four other games, a nice little bird teacher, and a slot machine to spend your winnings on. That’s right: do well at the card games and you’ll earn coins for the slot machine, and win at the slot machine to get trinkets that Blanche found out in the world, or new avatars for your characters. They’re purely cosmetic, but it’s great to have even more rewards for winning a card game than just “you won the card game!” The opponent plays well, always giving you a run for your money, but is beatable. And the trinkets that Blanche the raven gives you are trinkets that you might get from a raven you befriended in real life.

A single game, depending on which one you play, takes maybe ten minutes, and the card graphics are large enough that it’s easy to tell the suits. This is important for Gin Rummy, for example, because the suit is very important. As you know, if you’ve played Gin Rummy in real life. I hadn’t. I had only played Cribbage, Hearts (which is NOT the same as Spades), and “Spit and Mouse,” which is Spite & Malice if you’re being silly. Maybe it’s a regional thing.

Anyway, Carte Blanche is a lovely way to spend an afternoon. Learn some card games you’ve never played before and then show them to your friends and family in real life. Can you have the patience and clear rule explanations of Blanche? Well… probably not, but you can try.

(Releasing February 25, 2025, on Catalog and Itch. Copy provided by developer. See more details at its official website.)