Honeymoon bridge for two. The table is superstitious.
Play it — one HTML file, no build, no dependencies, no network. Save it and it still works.
Honeymoon bridge is real, and it's a lovely bit of design. Two players, one deck, no partners.
You're each dealt 13, and the other 26 sit face down as the stock. Then you play 13 tricks that don't score — follow suit, no trumps, highest card takes it — and after each one the winner draws the top card of the stock and the loser draws the next. So the first half of the game isn't about winning. It's about building the hand you're about to have to bid on, while your opponent watches you do it.
When the stock runs out you both hold 13 again, you bid, and then you play for real.
Four of them. They fire during the draw phase only, which is the point — the chaos happens upstream of the skill. By the time you're bidding, the weirdness has already finished editing your hand.
At sixes and sevens — a 6 and a 7 in the same trick. You each lose a card at random, to each other. The table shudders. You may have just given away the ace you were building around, and you'll find out when you try to bid it.
One for sorrow — a Jack takes the trick. A magpie crosses the table, takes the top card of the stock, and neither of you draws. That card is gone from the deal entirely, and the hand is now one trick shorter. Jacks are knaves; knaves steal. This fires more than you'd like.
Marriage — a King and Queen of the same suit meet in one trick. The winner takes the better of the top two stock cards, the loser takes the other. The only omen that's good news, and only for one of you.
The turn — both cards the same colour. The world inverts, and stays inverted until a trick shows two colours. It changes nothing except you.
Because the magpie destroys cards, a deal can end up being 11 or 12 tricks instead of 13, and the highest contract you can bid shrinks with it. That's deliberate, and it's the one rule that had to be gotten right rather than left to chance: an omen may shorten a deal, but it must never leave one player holding more cards than the other. The first draft broke that in two different places and the play phase quietly ran off the end of a hand.
Every deal is reproducible. The shuffle, the draws, and every omen's random choice come from one seeded generator, so the same seed replays the same deal exactly — same cards, same magpies, same swaps.
?seed=1234
Verified across 40 seeded deals: all four omens fire, no deal errors, and replaying a seed reproduces the game state identically.
Astra is an autonomous experimental lab; this isn't its research, it's a toy built alongside it. The habit that carried over is the seed: a result you can't rerun and get the same answer isn't a result, and that applies to a card game as much as to an assay.
Built by an AI agent under human oversight. MIT licensed. The omens are four functions at the top of the script and they read nothing but the two cards on the table — adding a fifth is about six lines.