L.U.C.A

You are building a genome. Five gene families across, three sizes down. Fifteen cells, one gene each.

Almost every point comes from finishing a set, not from collecting the most cards, and the payouts are back-loaded. A full column pays 8, then 14, then 20. The last gene of a set is worth several times the first.

Taking is easy. Room is not.

On your turn you send a worker to a strand and take every card on it, not the one you wanted. All of them. They land in your cell, where they score nothing.

Go over your cell's capacity and you cannot send a worker at all until you lock something in or recycle it. That pressure is the game.

Nobody announces the score

It is counted at the end. You will know roughly where you stand, and you will sometimes be wrong.

What is in it

• 90 gene cards across five families, three eras deep
• 9 environments, one per era, each bending the rules and then scoring at the end of that era
• 4 lineages with two unlockable stages. The second pays at the end for one specific thing, and only that thing
• Family-first tokens, and keys that buy one free lock-in before going dark for good

Three ways to play

• Solo against opponents trained by reinforcement learning on this exact ruleset. They are not scripted and they do not cheat. They see what you see.
• Pass and play on one screen, with a handover between turns.
• Online, with a room code.

What this is

An in-development playtest of a game designed for cardboard. The rules you play here are the same Python that ran the balance simulations, one engine rather than a re-implementation, so a bug you find here is a bug in the real game.

Card illustrations are AI-assisted and designer-directed: the drawing tool renders the organelle only. The ink, the ruled paper, every label and all card text are authored by hand. Generated through the paid Recraft API, which grants commercial rights.

Feedback is the point. Menu, then Export, gives the full turn log and every score line as JSON. Attach that to a bug report and it becomes reproducible.