SOLITAIRE.EXE: A Roguelike on the Night Shift

It is 1998. You are the night-shift clerk, and the job is simple: play Solitaire against the machine until the quota is met. Payroll is your score. Every third night is a performance review. The building locks from the outside at midnight. For your safety.

SOLITAIRE.EXE is Klondike solitaire rebuilt as a roguelike. You are not trying to clear the board. You are trying to hit a score target before the deck burns out. Every flip, play and send winds chips onto that suit's SPOOL, and nothing on a spool counts until you commit it. Send a card home and that suit pays out at the chain you have right then. Commit early and the spool is thin. Hold it until it is nearly full and the commit is PERFECT, and pays like it. Commit two or three suits back to back and they CHORD, and the whole thing compounds. Or back a spool up at half rate before something takes it. That one decision, bank now or push the chain hotter and risk it, is the whole game. Nine deals a week. Miss the quota and the shift is over.

Chips do not score straight away. Each suit has its own SPOOL, and every flip, play and draw winds chips onto the spool of the card that earned them. Sending a card home COMMITS that suit's spool at the chain you hold right then. Wind a spool to the brim before you send and it pays PERFECT PRESSURE; commit two suits within three plays and they CHORD. Between shifts, the PLUGIN VENDOR opens: 104 plugins that rewrite the rules, 20 of them legendary and never on the shelf, plus card seals, consumables and floppy-disk decks that reshape the whole run. HUNGRY.SYS patches one card so it devours the next five sends in its suit, then repays DOUBLE. And when the till runs dry, HR is standing by with CONTRACTS: a boon on signing, a rider that never expires. Read page two. Sign anyway.

Every third night an unauthorized process starts. AUDIT.EXE voids your hearts. BSOD.SYS throttles your chain. SPOOL32.EXE hides your score until you clock out. Thirty-seven reviews on file, three per run, each a boss that breaks a different scoring rule for the night. Beat one and MGMT files your severance package. A reward. Probably.

There is no monster. There is a process, and it was running on this desk before you were hired. It does not play the cards. It plays you. It keeps a file: the weeks you lost, the review that took you, the plugin you could not put down, the best night you ever had. Lose a review and it takes something into the building with it. Clock in the next night and it tells you what it kept. It reads how you play, too, and says so, in the mail, in the shop chat, on the boot screen, with the numbers. The memos carry attachments: your personnel file, the floor plan with your desk circled, a door camera that gets a little brighter every time you look. The janitor, j4nit0r_77, messages you on OFFICE PAL 98 to warn you about the vending machine on 3, and about the last clerk who got real good at this, then real quiet. When your deck dies, something in the machine sometimes reaches out and gives you one more card. It takes pity. You never asked it to. Climb eight corporate ranks and HR says you are part of the building now. There is no day shift. There never was.

• Play real Klondike solitaire scored on four SPOOLS: every flip, play and send winds chips onto a suit, and nothing counts until you commit it, PERFECT or thin, chorded or alone.
• Build a run from 104 cursed plugins across three programs: 88 for SOLITAIRE.EXE, 8 native to FREECELL.EXE and 8 native to SPIDER.EXE, plus card seals, consumables, and floppy-disk decks. No two shifts pay the same.
• Sign HR contracts that trade a boon now for a rider forever: an extra plugin slot against every quota rising, a hotter chain against a plugin powering down each shift, cash on signing against a payslip that never bonuses again.
• Beat 37 performance-review bosses, each one breaking a different rule of how scoring works.
• Boot the week from 10 different SYSTEM files, each rewriting the run's rules before you deal a card: no recycle, a 40-card deck where 10s are kings, a chain that only halves, a wage paid in bonuses only, a seven-shift crunch week, and DOWNSIZED.SYS, where the hearts have been let go.
• Uncover SUCCESSION.DOC: the clerk before you left a week unfinished. Restore their shift report from the Recycle Bin, take their seed, and work their exact schedule, reviews, and final hand to the number they left behind.
• Climb 8 corporate ranks across every run you will ever play, unlocking contracts, card backs, and the redacted HR incident files. Your cards scar, and the building keeps a personnel file on every one of them.
• Push your luck at SLOTS.EXE, feed THE TERMINAL, punch the monkey, wave at BUDD-E and meet his family, five imps with one favour each. Regret most of it.
• A diegetic Windows 98 desktop: real BIOS boot, pop-up ads that blast their own tinny MIDI jingles, a working Recycle Bin, and a Blue Screen that means you are fired.
• A reactive soundtrack: 146 tracks across 16 electronic genres, from rave, jungle and UK garage to hardcore, psytrance and industrial. Every track is built in three layers that arrive as the night escalates, so the music shifts up a gear as your chain heats and drops the bass when you smash the quota.
• PLAYER.EXE sits in the Start menu from the first boot, a built-in W98 audio player spinning the night's tracks while you sort. Own the soundtrack and it loads the real album instead.
• 40 achievements, daily and weekly seeded shifts, the nine-review GAUNTLET, and ENDLESS for the ones who cannot go home.

Clock in. Beat the quota. Do not get TERMINATED.

SOLITAIRE.EXE contains no jump scares. It contains a job.

[h3]Third-party software[/h3]The Windows build ships eSpeak NG, a speech synthesizer the game runs as a separate, unmodified program to say your user name on the hold line. eSpeak NG is free software under the GNU General Public License version 3; the licence ships beside it and its source is published at