BRTCG
Imagine a game night that starts innocently enough: a deck between friends, a little banter, a few quick explanations, a feeling that tonight might be fun. Then the cards begin to move. Information starts changing hands. A person across the table becomes harder to read. Someone smiles at exactly the wrong moment. Someone else realizes far too late that what looked like safety was only delay.
BRTCG is designed to feel social at first and personal soon after. It is a game of survival, pressure, fragile alliances, dangerous timing, and the slow dread that comes from knowing a single card can reshape the balance of the room. The more players lean in, the more unstable the night can become.
This is not a game built around comfort. It is built around tension. Around instinct. Around what people choose to protect when they think the deck is turning against them. Meet a friend. Lose a partner. Or discover that the person beside you has been waiting all evening for the exact right card to appear.
Play the Room. Survive the Deck.
Built for up to six players, BRTCG is meant for parties, late-night gatherings, and the kind of somewhat-friendly evening where three couples sit down together expecting strategy and leave wondering which private grudge, quiet suspicion, or accidental betrayal changed the whole atmosphere halfway through. The table is the stage, but the players become part of the mechanism.
Cards are collected, traded, withheld, protected, and sometimes weaponized. A round may begin with simple choices and end in consequences that linger long after the game itself is over. There are moments of control, moments of panic, and moments where what matters most is not what you hold in your hand, but what everyone else thinks you hold.
The rules are meant to invite people in; the experience is meant to keep them uneasy. BRTCG should feel playable, memorable, theatrical, and just unstable enough that no one at the table can ever fully relax once the deck begins to reveal what it wants.
Collecting is part of the hook. BRTCG is imagined not as a single static deck, but as a growing system of possibilities: cards that deepen the lore, cards that alter play, cards that return in whispers, cards players hope to find, and cards they quietly fear seeing again. The deck is part game system, part artifact, part escalating invitation.
Over time, that could mean special variants, alternate survival events, limited card types, rare inserts, character-driven expansions, and mechanics that do more than change a turn — they change the tone of the whole evening. A single addition to the deck could transform a casual session into a tense, story-heavy standoff where nobody wants to show weakness first.
The goal is not merely to own cards. The goal is to gather pieces of a larger, darker design and place them in the hands of players willing to see what happens when the game stops pretending to be harmless.
The Deck Remembers More Than It Should
Because BRTCG grows out of the world of Bereft Reality, the experience is not meant to feel generic. It should feel rooted in a place where perception shifts, certainty decays, and people do not always remain what they first appeared to be. Some cards may preserve. Some may expose. Some may tempt. Some may ask the table to choose a victim, a sacrifice, an ally, or a lie.
And that is where the real horror begins: not in a jump scare, but in the realization that the deck seems to understand social pressure better than the players do. It finds the fault lines. It rewards observation. It punishes arrogance. It invites risk. It turns trust into a resource, then makes everyone wonder whether they spent too much of it too early.
The best sessions should feel like a story nobody at the table expected to tell. The worst sessions may feel even better.
Hover Draw
Drift too close and the deck offers a suggestion. Whether it is helpful, manipulative, or hungry is not always obvious.
Click Draw
Some cards do not come quietly. Some require intent. Press the button and force the deck to answer.
Card Design Contest / Crowd Support / Future Expansion
BRTCG is not being imagined as a quiet side project. It is being imagined as something with reach — something collectible, discussable, expandable, and potentially community-shaped. That opens the door to a future card design contest where artists, horror fans, and collaborators can help introduce new ideas, new imagery, and new threats into the deck itself.
It also hints at possible crowd support, early-backer interest, special runs, collector material, and a bigger push into making the game feel like an event rather than a novelty. This is the kind of concept that should travel. It should unsettle people at parties. It should start conversations. It should look good in a collector box and even better spread across a table where nobody is certain who is about to turn on whom.
Potential rewards and incentives may include:
- Autographed pages from the original Bereft Reality manuscript — in the author’s horrible handwriting.
- Signed copies of Bereft Reality.
- Signed cards by the author and artist.
- Prototype or collector cards tied to early development.
- Special contributor recognition for selected designs.
- Additional dark little extras that fit the world and its appetite.
Go big. We are not staying home with this one.
Placeholder Characters
Placeholder Businesses
Somewhere between a party game, a survival mechanic, a social pressure test, and a horror artifact, BRTCG intends to become the kind of experience people remember in pieces: the card someone should never have drawn, the laugh that died too quickly, the moment one friend sided with another, the round where a couple stopped trusting each other, the whisper that this was only the beginning.
More cards. More tension. More revelation. More to come.