Setlist Shuffle

Your deck is your genre.

Every turn you draw three activities from a deck you built and spend the turn on one. Rehearse, gig, post, write, scheme. What you play changes what you sound like, and what you sound like decides which rooms will have you.

There is no genre select. You become a genre, one card at a time, and you can stop being it just as easily.

Reach or devotion. Not both.

Mainstream sounds win you thousands of fans who drift away by spring. Cult sounds win you a few hundred who will follow you anywhere and tell everyone. Both are real careers. Neither is the right answer, because the checkpoints decide what this career needed, and you only ever know the category in advance, never the exact test.

Fail forward, but not for free.

Miss a checkpoint and your career survives, scarred. Your numbers drop, someone leaves the crew, and a traitless dead card joins your deck, diluting the sound you spent twenty turns building. Three scars and it is over.

Eight tiers of harder rooms.

Win, and the next rung opens: shorter notice, narrower offers, a more fragile career, a bigger final room. Each is a real difficulty step, measured rather than guessed.

A scene that remembers you.

Careers end. What survives is the scene you left behind: Royalties that unlock signature cards, genre crew and new places to start from. Unlocks give you options, never raw power. Every run stays a fair test.

Built on numbers, not vibes

• A headless simulation plays 42,000 careers and asserts the design still holds. Ten gated assertions, and the build does not ship if one fails.
• Seeded and deterministic. The same seed is the same career, every time.
• Every screen is reachable without a mouse. Runs in a window, on a handheld, or on a desktop.