Skip to content
Every app

No icon yet — a stand-in

Web · Game

CORDEL

A one-on-one card game on classic Hearthstone-style rules, with a 66-card set from Brazilian folklore and an omen that rewrites every turn

Source onlyFree · Open source
View sourceNotify me

Screenshots

  • A match on turn 10: Curupira's minions facing Boitatá's Carranca, a hand of five cards, and the turn's Agouro — Vento Sul — pinned on the right
  • The chapbook cover: CORDEL, Guerra dos Encantados, a six-line verse, and the choice between Curupira and Boitatá
  • Turn 14: four minions on Curupira's side, Boitatá down to 7 life, and the Neblina omen in play
  • The mulligan, 'Abra a mão': five opening cards, including the finished woodcut of the Tatu-Bola, and a button to keep the hand

About CORDEL

CORDEL keeps the classic collectible-card-game rules on purpose — thirty life, ten mana crystals, seven board slots, a mulligan and a coin, taunts, deathrattles, summoning sickness, fatigue — and builds everything else new. The new mechanic is the Agouro: at the start of every turn a chapbook page flips face-up on a string across the board and rules that turn for both players, from every minion getting +1 Attack to battlecries firing twice to nobody being allowed to touch a hero. There are twelve of them, reshuffled each game, so you react to the turn rather than plan around it. The 66-card set comes from Brazilian folklore — Curupira, Boitatá, Saci, Iara, Cuca, Mapinguari — split between two heroes with opposed styles, one holding the board and one burning it. The whole interface is a folheto de cordel, the woodcut chapbooks sold on string at Brazilian markets, and the game is in Brazilian Portuguese.

Who it's for

Card-game players who know the classic rules and want a new set to play them with — and anyone who reads Portuguese and grew up on these legends.

What it does

  • Classic rules, unchanged: 30 life, 10 mana, 7 board slots, mulligan and coin
  • Twelve Agouros — a shared omen flips every turn and rules it for both players
  • 66 collectible cards across two heroes and a neutral pool, plus 6 tokens
  • Two heroes with opposed styles: Curupira holds the board, Boitatá burns it
  • Click-to-aim targeting, and every game replays exactly from its seed
  • Balance held by a test: 60 AI-vs-AI games fail the suite if either hero runs away with it

Behind the build

The rules are copied rather than improved, deliberately: that game works, and rebuilding it badly to prove a point would only make something worse.

The novelty is concentrated in the Agouro, and in the set itself. The art is still coming in — 17 of about 86 woodcut-style illustrations are done, generated from one locked prompt so they read as a single printed set, and every other card carries a seeded procedural woodcut block so the game was complete before its pictures were.

Information

Runs on
Web · Game
Status
Source only
Price
Free · Open source
Requires
A modern browser · the game is in Portuguese
Source
Public on GitHub
Telemetry
None
Built with
React & TypeScript
Stack
ReactTypeScriptViteVitest

CORDEL is source only, for now.

The code is public, but there's no packaged release yet. Build it from the repository today, or leave an email and hear when there's one you can double-click.

Tell me when it shipsView source

More game apps

See all 3

  • BEAROUT

    Web · iOS · Game

    An arcade-idle bear ranch: hunt, stack the haul, run it to the sell table, upgrade, repeat

    Live

  • Crossy Royale

    Web · Game

    Crossy Road as a battle royale — thirty chickens on one start line, a fog wall behind them and a safe zone that keeps…

    Source only