Across the Stellar Corridor — in dock cantinas and at inn tables near the nodes — people play the same square-faced deck. They call it Vektra. The cards come down from the First Ones, the builders of the passages, but their original purpose and the rules they were first dealt by are lost. Modern civilizations play with copies, and give the figures their own faces.
We built Vektra the way we build everything here: as something that already exists in the world — something a character can sit down to, bet on, lose a relic over — not as a puzzle with a hidden answer about the First Ones.
A deck of fifty-six
Four equal signs, thirteen figures each, from the Shard up to Doom — the highest ordinary card, never a wild one. Plus four blank Gates: a Gate has no sign and no rank, counts as zero, and forms nothing, not even with another Gate.
Five cards, two bets, one Skok
You're dealt five. There are two rounds of betting and, between them, a single Skok — your one chance to change your hand. A normal Skok improves your cards but makes you reveal one: information is the price. A Skok through the Gate lets you swap more and show nothing — but a Gate kept to the end is dead weight.
The whole game lives in that trade: a better hand, or a hand nobody has read.
No card is magic
This matters to us. The Thief and the Deceiver don't steal chips or swap faces. Doom is the top card, not a joker. A First-One original can cost a fortune — rare, ancient, made of a precious material — and it still isn't a stronger card at an honest table. Price buys a story, not an edge.
That is the rule that keeps Vektra inside the Corridor's world. The network of the First Ones is mute, material infrastructure: no mind, no will, no message. Their deck is the same. It doesn't open a passage, carry a signal, or know the truth. It's just a very old, very good game.
The table is live. Deal yourself in — against the house bots, in Polish or English — and see whether you'd keep the Gate, or spend it.