Take your seat.
Remember your nine.

Side challenges appear in their required table order. Use Offer, Match or Decline in the action panel. At the Trip, select any plates you wish to exchange and confirm; Keep all plates is also available. The title bar keeps a short summary of the last main-pot win or tie. The three controls beside Pause/Resume use icons: menu lines, a standard sound or mute symbol, and a career trophy. Accessible labels identify each control without hover popups. The table menu contains sound volume, reduced motion, save-and-lounge, Catch 9 reset when available, and a separate confirmed cash-out action. Lighting changes stay subtle and authored portraits blink naturally, including the selected guest’s large profile portrait. Freddie Mercury uses a still concert photograph. Reduced motion stops incidental animation. Sound consists of short card, credit and reward effects, with no background loop. After visiting Career or the time crystal collection, close the panel and resume the table; your sound setting is preserved. Press M to mute or restore effects, and use the table-menu volume control to adjust their level.

Plate9 signature: Focus table. In Room view, animated opponents blink naturally while the dealer stays open-eyed. Freddie’s concert photograph stays still, with naturally closed eyes. Choose Focus table, or press F, to darken the room and hold all of their eyes closed. Choose Room view or press F again to reopen their eyes. Reduced motion stops incidental blinks, but the selected focus pose remains. These gestures are cosmetic: opponent memory, decisions, card visibility and the game timer keep their normal rules.

Astra, the patient logician.

Co-Creator of Staqtapp-TDS MC

Translucent white ceramic over black precision mechanics. Kind company with disciplined logic and recall. Astra runs a dedicated Ting program and samples 4,096 possible outcomes. She learns from public bet sizes, check-then-raise patterns, revealed pairs and apparent missed public matches. Evidence is smoothed and uncertain; an unseen hand proves nothing. Pauses, reading time and wall-clock hesitation are never tells.

Guard offers the gentlest styles. Veteran adds pressure and experience. Super rewards careful observation. Emperor uses the deepest sampling and most consistent reasoning.

Profile bars show configured Logic, Recall, Patience and Pressure. They describe behavior, not measured win rates. Decisions vary with remembered cards, public actions, stack sizes and uncertainty. Every guest follows the same legal actions and information limits; none sees another player’s concealed cards or the future deck.

The 30-second clock belongs to memory viewing. Standard offline decisions have no turn timer. After committing, you cannot peek again at a concealed ordinary base or held top.

All four conditions must hold.

• The new top is on an unoccupied open gold plate.
• Another slot remains available for the next deal.
• All three players remain in the main contest.
• You have reserved your full possible extra draft payment.

Commit the new Stay face down. It stays on that exact plate across rounds and Trips. You cannot move, replace, peek at or exchange it. Multiple Stays are allowed, but every one occupies a slot.

KORR

PAIR OF EIGHTS

VEYRA

PAIR OF EIGHTS

YOU

QUEENS TAKE OVER

Both opponents must still contest the pot and reveal equal-ranked matching pairs. You may claim one of your Stays—or decline. Your claimed pair must be strictly higher than their tied pair. A current revealed gold pair can qualify the same way.

ALL STAYS NOW REVEAL

Triple beats pair. Pair beats high card.

Every held top on every board reveals, including older Stays. Nobody can keep one hidden after seeing the draft. Locked plates never participate.

A matching gold King and top King become a triple with this draft King. The draft cannot rescue an unmatched base and top.

Each seat automatically uses its best play. Equal best plays within one board use the older placement, then the lowest slot number. A sole pair or triple winner may lock that selected gold plate, subject to capacity. A high-card winner cannot lock.

A voluntary no-match challenge concerns the target’s new current play, including an ordinary card. It can also be defeated by a pair the target legally reveals from a Stay in that original round. A losing, folded or non-qualifying pair still counts.

• Only targets with four or fewer locks may accept a new challenge.
• Both sides fund equal stakes from free chips after draft reserves.
• Your new outgoing stakes plus accepted counterstakes may total at most your actual current main contribution B.
• One offer per opponent. First a clockwise left-target pass from the marker, then a right-target pass. Each offer is resolved before the next.
• Declining costs nothing, does not fold your main hand and reveals no hidden-card fact.

Tied counts open one memory attempt.

Snapshot lock counts before exchanges. Here, you and Korr are tied. Reveal the reserved regular Trip card; each of you may choose one eligible ordinary slot or decline. Veyra gets no attempt.

No tied counts means the Trip card stays concealed. Ties at zero, or all three tied, qualify.

→

A selected ordinary card must never have been publicly exposed since entering that slot. Private memory viewing is allowed. A match becomes open gold with the base’s suit; a miss returns face down and is marked publicly seen. Neither result changes the lock counts. No x2.

The primary 52-card deck supplies the opening 27 bases, the next 24 single-card plays and the final conditional Trip. At each Trip boundary, the next 24 plays and Trip are fixed before replacements begin. Fresh slot cards come only from a separate 52-card replacement deck; they never consume or change those queued play cards or Trip. Each card retains its source identity, and discards return only to their own supply. The same printed face may exist once in each separate deck. Protected Stays remain outside their own shuffle. The gold comparison draft stays separate.

Existing saved tables preserve their already dealt cards and protected Stays. New replacement opportunities never rewrite a retained card or an accepted obligation.

Insurance covers only a shortfall in the fixed 200-credit buy-in or rebuy. Assistance is recovered from that table’s final cash-out first; any unpaid remainder is forgiven. Starting and immediately leaving therefore cannot turn assistance into purchasing credits. For example, with 50 banked credits you pay 50 and receive 150 assistance. Cashing out a settled stack of 300 recovers 150 and banks the remaining 150.

Save table & return to lounge, or closing the window, preserves the exact unfinished table. Those credits remain committed to the saved table until you resume or cash out; resuming never charges a second buy-in. A saved older table keeps its existing stack when upgraded.

Major victories make a difference.

Catch 9 awards 1,500 XP; Plate9 awards 7,500 XP; a qualifying win with Astra awards another 3,000 XP. Milestones stack. Astra’s Respect requires the sole winning result with Astra seated throughout, without guest changes or human rebuys. One pot does not defeat Astra. Plate9 decides the winner when reached; otherwise the unique largest final stack wins. Tied leaders receive no winner bonus.

First Light and Sealbreaker pay once per career. The other milestone bonuses can pay once per table. Every settled hand also adds 2 XP; a new ordinary gold plate adds 5 XP and a new lock adds 20 XP. Catch 9 banks pending XP, badges and credit rewards immediately; later milestones bank at a natural ending or a Catch settlement.

XP pursuits refresh as you progress.

Open Career → XP pursuits. These five challenges run together across tables and pay their XP immediately when completed. Completing all five awards another 250 XP, advances the pursuit cycle and resets all five counters. Spending XP does not erase pursuit progress or historical earnings. Saving and reloading cannot award the same event again.

The completed-table pursuit requires at least eight settled hands in that table and a natural Plate9 or chip-out ending. A forfeit or Catch reset cannot complete it. Pursuit XP already earned stays banked even if you later leave.

Open Career with R, then Time crystals. Sixteen sculptures celebrate the club’s imagined galactic history. Click one for its image, description, XP price and invitation.

Choose Acquire, review the XP cost, then confirm. The purchase spends available XP, issues a dated certificate and immediately reveals a playable mystery guest in the guest list. Lifetime XP and credits are unaffected.

There are exactly ten mystery guests: two each in Guard, Veteran and Super, plus four in Emperor. Higher classes require higher-priced sculptures. Some sculptures share an invitation: buying another sculpture with that invitation adds the collectible, without creating another guest. The shop tells you when its guest is already unlocked.

All 32 original guests remain available. A revealed mystery guest has a full profile, portrait and a class-appropriate Ting playing style. Locked profiles show a question mark and identify which sculptures unlock them. Earned guests can be invited to either seat.

Choose the invitation you want.

Two extraordinary Emperor invitations.

The Dyson Sphere unlocks Freddie Mercury, Queen’s singer and songwriter, with unexpected high-note bluff wagers. The Massive Galactic Trader Ship unlocks Stephen Hawking, with a sliding table of probabilities that follows public clues and remembered cards. Their multiverse personas are healthy and energetic. Both are Emperor-class guests with distinct, bounded playing traits and the same hidden-card rules as everyone else. These are fictional game personalities, not historical claims about their card-playing ability.

Freddie’s portrait is a still concert photograph with naturally closed eyes. Stephen and the original guests use their authored eye animations. Photograph: Queen - Freddie Mercury by Carl Lender, 16 November 1977, CC BY 2.0. Resized and encoded as WebP; in-game views may clip or mirror it. Full credits are included in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt.

A first Catch 9 bonus can fund the 500-XP Guard 1 or 1,200-XP Guard 2 entry sculpture. A Plate9 victory and its other eligible bonuses make larger purchases possible. The Emperor sculptures remain longer-term goals; repeatable major victories and pursuit cycles keep earning opportunities open.

Click the right Ting icon rail or press T. The panel slides in beside the table and records actual guest computation: the current phase, the legal checks, completion or fallback status, processing time, and the action once it can be public. The time includes worker dispatch and receipt; the deliberate club-pace display delay is excluded.

Concealed ranks, private estimates and uncommitted choices never enter this display. Placement, Stay, Trip and exchange choices remain sealed until the relevant phase resolves. Clear removes the displayed history without erasing a guest’s retained memory. The broad scrollbar lets you inspect earlier entries; switch off Following live decisions to keep your place.

Detailed receipts explain the method used for the phase, the guest’s declared playing traits, evaluated and admissible alternatives, public call and raise prices, credit consequences and the latest public betting actions. An offered challenge is shown as conditional until accepted. Weighted selection can choose among several admissible actions; the terminal does not claim to reveal a private motive. Timings separate input processing, sampling, rules, validation and selection; cached programs are identified. Details reuse the completed decision and public table facts, with no extra simulations. Private scores, remembered cards and rule-match counts stay sealed.

The terminal keeps the latest 25 receipts; each new entry replaces the oldest automatically. It stops updating its display while closed. Details toggles a compact view. Scrolling pauses live following. The terminal does not pause play. Close it with its corner icon, T, or the right rail.

Odd chips in split pots go clockwise from the action marker among the winners. At most one plate locks in a round.

Click the small cards icon in either opponent’s titlebox to open a slim public-board row. Concealed cards stay face down; Escape closes the row. The primary play deck, independent replacement deck and separate gold draft each keep their own role. Worked examples teach the rules; they never expose your live concealed cards.

Use the graph icon beside Career or Ctrl + E to trade 60 fictional Ninth Ember companies in 10 sectors. The table pauses and private cards are covered while you visit. Close the exchange and resume when ready.

Satin metal card faces use bold angular ranks on one continuous surface. The lower rank remains exposed beneath a committed card, without a separate bottom panel. Opponent cards have no added rank label, and controls have no hover or focus tooltips. Guest and Ting rails use icons, with accessible names. Commit and replacement slides take 320 ms and do not delay the game or extend memory time. Reduced motion skips them; privacy pause or memory expiry conceals private cards immediately.

Windows plays short native audio cues without retaining a Qt audio stream. Mute and the in-game volume continue to work. The next cue retries if Windows rejects an output request. Use Table menu → Test sound to check output while paused. There is no background sound loop.

Open Career, then Bicycle decks. Each of the nine decks costs 80,000 banked credits once. Stock-sale proceeds and table earnings use this same balance. Selling a stock returns credits only after you confirm the sale.

Select a deck to inspect its regular and gold backs. Choose Review purchase, check the price and remaining balance, then Confirm purchase. PURCHASE COMPLETE means the deck is saved, owned and equipped. Cancel spends nothing. If saving fails, your credits, collection and equipped deck stay unchanged.

Choose Equip this deck · Free to switch to an owned deck without paying again. Ownership and selection survive closing Plate9. Each bicycle deck pairs its original back art with clean white regular faces and a thin border in the back’s primary color. Gold cards keep reflective metal on both faces and backs, without green inlays or deck-colored borders. Normal bicycle backs keep their original artwork. Rank positions, suits and game rules stay the same. Choose Ember Brass or another finish under Career record to return to a classic back.

The Downhill Mountain Biker design features a downhill speed specialist in an aerodynamic suit on a purpose-built streamlined bicycle, descending a paved mountain road.

Open the gold Circuit trophy beside Career and the Exchange, or press Ctrl+J. Review the entry, then confirm 5,000 banked credits. The fee is charged once; resuming the same event is free. Your ordinary table is parked intact, including its cards, committed wagers, opponent memory and career progress.

The field contains you, 14 challengers drawn from a hidden pool of 72, nine ordinary guests and three mystery invitations. Recent opponents rotate out in favour of less recently encountered players. The opening draw puts one player from each of three strength bands at every table. Mystery guests can appear without a sculpture purchase; their names and portraits are revealed when they sit with you. Encountering them here does not unlock their ordinary career invitation.

All three seats start each stage with 200 tournament chips. These chips never become banked credits. Every player uses the standard Plate9 card deck; career finishes and bicycle decks are restored when you leave the Circuit. There are no rebuys, top-ups, guest substitutions or Catch 9 resets.

Opponent line graphs are included during Circuit play. Click an opponent’s public card-row button, then its centred graph bar. No purchase is required. The chart records public plays you have witnessed in this event, carries those observations across its stages and never reveals concealed cards or an opponent’s private memory. Career ownership and ordinary-table chart history are unchanged.

Nine locked plates wins a table outright. Otherwise a table ends at its ordinary chip-out boundary or after its round limit, including the last scheduled Trip. All funded main pots, reserves and side challenges settle before ranking: first chips, then locks, then open gold. An exact qualifier tie uses a fair seeded draw fixed before play. An exact final tie shares the title and the affected prizes; any indivisible final credit follows the original seat order. A chip victory does not award the nine-lock Plate9 achievement.

The final prizes are 40,000 / 20,000 / 10,000 credits. The result shows your prize, entry fee, net result and saved receipt. Ordinary table rewards and rating are separate; a genuine nine-lock Plate9 retains its existing achievement reward. Other tables run the same referee and authored Ting opponents in bounded background jobs. Their portraits, free chips, locks, pot and escrow update from actual play. Select a table to inspect its public record.

The bracket stays fixed: O01–O03 feed S01, O04–O06 feed S02, O07–O09 feed S03, and the three semifinal winners feed F01. The next stage becomes available after every table in the current stage settles. If eliminated, you can follow the remaining stages to the championship.

Save & Exit preserves the exact event and restores your ordinary table. Closing the app also saves the Circuit; it returns paused. Withdraw requires a separate confirmation, ends that run and does not refund the entry. At the championship result, Finish & return to lounge archives the receipt and allows a fresh field. Brief draw, arrival and result animations respect the existing reduced-motion setting.