Cobalt Break - Solitaire

The war is nine years old and nobody's winning.

You're a war planner in orbit around Astoria — a cold blue gas giant fifty-three astronomical units from Earth, on a 444-year eccentric orbit that will carry her out of reach for two centuries starting in the 2150s. Spacers call the war the Cobalt War for the color of the giant. Two organizations grind each other across her orbit: the Astoria Charter (Geneva's law-and-customs authority) and the Indigo Charter Corporation (a four-corp consortium with its own private navy). Your job isn't to win. Your job is to keep any single front from breaking before the news cycle moves on.

How it plays

Each suit is one of the four contested moons — Vael (♠), Halix (♥), Kerion (♦), Threnody (♣). Every turn you draw a card and choose one of three actions:

• Reinforce — place the card on its own suit's front and hope for a rank match.
• Counter — spend one of your six tokens to trim a different-suit front at the cost of the drawn card.
• Nullwake — bank a joker as a deniable off-world contractor to peel any front, including the one Counter can't touch.

You lose when any front stacks to five cards. You win when the war deck runs dry.

Real decisions from turn one: gamble on a risky Reinforce or spend a token, save the joker or burn it now, focus mitigation on the front on fire or spread thin across four smouldering ones.

Optional Theater Variants

For players who want more strategic texture, each moon has an optional variant — mix and match any subset from zero to all four. Refineries produce tokens on clearance, corridors pay out on successful matches, shipyards absorb an extra card before breaking, fuel skims enable a double-draw sortie. All opt-in, all thematic, all clearly labelled with their impact on win rate.

In the box: three PDFs — a printable rulesheet (~3 pages, ink-friendly white), a digital rulesheet (dark cobalt, same rules, on-screen aesthetic), and a 2-page Astoria Theater Field Briefing unpacking the setting behind the moon names. Four inline examples covering every core mechanic (Reinforce match, Reinforce grow, Counter save, Nullwake save). Three difficulty tiers (5 / 6 / 7 tokens), tuned around ~30–45% win rate at standard.

At the table: standard 52-card deck plus both jokers, six tokens (chips, coins, tally marks — anything), ten minutes.

Free. Print, play, break the line.