Card Thief Is Perfect for a Solitary Gamer Like Me

A card game for budding thieves in the night.

Being fiercely biased towards single-player games means I rob myself of the shared thrill that multiplayer and party-based games have. Call me a sad old hermit all you want, but having human interaction factored into the gameplay experience divides my attention and exhausts me, consequently taking me out of the immersion. 

Card games, particularly the competitive and strategic kind, are one of those genres that I frequently miss out on for this reason. On top of its social aspects, games like Hearthstone and Gwent require a comprehensive understanding of how skill synergies work in a deck-based medium, which I just find no fun.

Thankfully, there exists a genre of card games built on the rules of solitaire, where you finesse your way out of a deck of cards that you deal yourself. As the anti-social sad sack that I don’t mind being branded as, these games are perfect for me. There is a mobile game I regularly fall back to between gaming on console that hits that sweet solitaire spot for me called Card Thief, a title by developer Tinytouchtales.

The premise is simple: you are a thief who must sneak into a manor or castle, take whatever you can find, and leave undetected. The brilliance of this game is in its format, where each playthrough is attempted on a deck of cards laid out like a grid of obstacles representing the castle’s winding corridors. As a thief in the dark, your biggest enemy are cards that cast you in light, which are usually torches fixed on a wall or held by guards. The challenge is a balance between stealth and greed, where you must slink about in the shadows, collecting as much loot as you can while having enough moves left to sneak out of the premises.

As a fan of stealth games, I adore Card Thief to bits. Games from this genre—Dishonored, Mark of the Ninja, and Hitman come to mind—are some of the most immersive experiences you can have, given their emphasis on setting up environmental opportunities in order to cause havoc from the shadows. In Card Thief, this sort of spatial awareness comes into play with each move, as you review the currently laid out set of cards that you must work your way through. Nothing feels more satisfying than charting a path that clears every card in a single move—which the game rewards by restoring all your stealth points.

Progression is dependent on the loot that you haul per run. New tools and locations can be unlocked using tokens found in chests you can successfully escape with. Risk plays a big factor in how quickly you progress: each turn, the chest card increases in value but requires more stealth points to pick up. A higher-value chest card means a greater chance of getting tokens. The highest I’ve gotten my chest value is seven, but I’ve never been able to replicate this feat since.

Card Thief’s immersive atmosphere comes in part from its gorgeously drawn cards and environments. Whimsical illustrations are painted with a mostly dark palette, lending a foreboding, but mischievous air with each card dealt. This art style has become a staple look of Tinytouchtales’ games, which works very well with the medieval fantasy settings where some of its other titles take place.

Card games will always be intriguing to me as a format, regardless of how middling I am at most of them.  It’s in the way that they can replicate the thrill of more conventional genres—role-playing games, adventure, stealth—using a set of finely-tuned cards that deliver a consistent experience no matter how they’re dealt.

For solo gamers like me, I’m very glad solitaire-type games like Card Thief exist. They’re an entry point that may lead others to its more socially-designed cousins, but I’m satisfied exploring other takes from this sub-genre. They can be excellent distillations of more elaborate single-player games, if not a quick and fun way to pass time. And right now, time is something we have in spades.

Card Thief is available on iOS (P149) and Android (free-to-play with a one-time purchase that unlocks its full features).