Rasterjack

Rasterjack is a poker roguelike for the Commodore 64, where you build a scoring machine out of five cards and a rack of jokers.

Every blind sets a target. You get 8 cards, 4 hands and 3 discards to beat it, and each hand scores Chips × Mult. Clear a blind and three jokers are offered: rack one and it piles extra chips and mult onto every hand you play from then on, or skip it and bank one extra hand for the next blind. Banking does not stack: five hands is the most you can hold. A run is nine blinds — three antes of Small, Big and BOSS.

Rasterjack is fast-paced. Jokers and poker hands are how you win — there's no deck building.

Poker Hands

Every played hand scores:

(Base Chips + Card Chips) × Mult

Base Chips and Mult come from the hand type. Card Chips is the sum of the cards that actually score. Jokers add their chips and mult on top.

Hand	Chips	Mult
High Card	5	1
Pair	10	2
Two Pair	20	2
Three of a Kind	30	3
Straight	30	4
Flush	35	4
Full House	40	4
Four of a Kind	60	7
Straight Flush	100	8
Jack Attack (4 Jacks)	120	8

Card Chips

Only the cards that form the hand score. Play a 9 and a 6 as a High Card and the 6 adds nothing. Cards that pay nothing are drawn in dark gray after the hand lands.

2 through 10	face value
Jack, Queen, King	10
Ace	11

So a 9 and a 6 played as a High Card:

(5 + 9) × 1 = 14

Bosses

The third blind of every ante is a boss. Each states its rule on screen before a hand is played.

No boss repeats in a run.

The Wash

“Suits lost in the wash”

Color cycles under your hand until the suit glyphs smear into an unreadable blob, and the score preview jams. Played cards show their true suits once you commit. Count flushes from memory. Nothing scores differently.

Static

“Ranks hidden until selected”

Card ranks churn as static until a card is selected. Selecting and deselecting to peek is legal, and it is the whole counterplay. Nothing scores differently.

The Loader

“Hand value still loading”

The Chips × Mult = Score preview is gone. You get the hand NAME only, and the value lands after you play. You are expected to know what hands are worth. Nothing scores differently.

The Scroller

“Xscroll owns your card faces”

The card faces drift left and wrap, while the boxes and their key numbers hold still. Key N still selects box N, but the face you see in box N is not the card that lives there. Track them. Nothing scores differently.

Multiplexer

“Sixteen sprites parade over your hand”

Sixteen balloons sweep across the hand in two rows, each at its own speed, so the parade clumps and spreads. About half your cards are covered at any one moment. Selecting still works normally. Wait for a gap. Nothing scores differently.

The Bad PLA

“Each hand played rots screen and cards”

The charset bit-rots a little further with every hand you play, and it is not only cosmetic: each hand played rewrites the rank of one card you KEPT. The suit survives. It sometimes upgrades you, and two cards can rot into the same value. What you hold is what rots.

The Censor

“Target and one hand type redacted”

A bar covers the score TARGET, so you know where you stand but not how far you have to go. One poker hand is redacted too. Form it and its name is barred over a 0 × 0 = 0 readout. Play it anyway and it scores ZERO, fires no joker, and still costs you the hand. You learn which type by forming it. High Card is never the one.

The Blackout

“A joker goes dark each hand”

One joker in your rack goes dark and does not fire. It re-rolls on every refill, after discards as well as plays, so discarding to move the dark slot is real counterplay that costs a discard. An empty rack is a free blind.

Ante 3: The Finishers

Only these three can end a run, and all three take something real away from you.

The Crusher

“Each play crushes your hand”

Everything below the play line judders and is crushed toward the bottom border. Every hand you play shrinks your hand size by one, down to a floor of five. Play big while you still hold cards.

The Badline

“Each deal badlines a card: pays zero”

Every deal, the opening one included, marks one card in your hand. A badlined card still counts toward the hand type and toward flushes, but it pays ZERO chips and fires no per-card joker. A badlined Jack pays no Rasterjack bonus. Shedding a marked card only earns another on the refill. Marks follow the card, not the seat, and die with the blind.

The Knocker

“Discards load one action late”

The drive is failing. A discard hands you only what the last action still owed, and your new request joins the queue. Play a hand and the full refill arrives and clears the debt. A discard that would empty your hand is refused outright: READ ERROR, and it costs you nothing. Discard early, or not at all.

Jokers

Your rack holds 4 jokers. They fire as a hand scores, and each bar pulses as it pays out. A joker that finds nothing to score stays quiet.

After each cleared blind you are offered 3 of them at random. Take one or skip. You are never offered one you hold.

Unconditional Payout

These pay on every hand.

VBlank	+4 Mult
Raster	+30 Chips

Hand Shapes

These read the hand you played, and they fire on what the cards CONTAIN. A full house holds a pair and holds trips, so it pays Sprite Mux and Arpeggio both.

Sprite Mux +8 Mult
Any hand holding a pair: pair, two pair, trips, full house, quads.

Arpeggio +10 Mult
Any hand holding trips: trips, full house, quads.

Interlace +12 Mult
Any straight. Straight flush counts.

FLI +70 Chips
Any flush. Straight flush counts.

Bank Switch +16 Mult
Full house alone. No other hand holds one without being one.

Cards

These pay per card, and only for cards that scored. A card drawn in dark gray paid nothing, so it feeds nothing here.

Zero Page +12 Chips each
Every 2 and every 3.

High Byte +4 Chips each
Every Jack, Queen and King.

Datasette +3 Chips each
Every heart.

Blitter Envy +3 Chips each
Every diamond.

$D020 +2 Chips/card
The exception: pays for every card you played, scoring or not.

What You Held Back

SID +2 Mult/discard
Every discard you have not spent.

Warp Mode +3 Mult/hand
Every hand you have left AFTER this one. The hand you are playing does not pay for itself.

The Legendary

Rasterjack +40 Chips +4 Mult
Pays for each Jack that scores.

The game's namesake, and the only joker outside the flat draft. It is rarer than a common and never offered in the first draft of a run. Four Jacks in a deck, so the ceiling is +160 Chips and +16 Mult and you will not reach it often.

A Jack that does not score pays nothing.

And One More

NOP nothing
Does nothing. Except during a Jack Attack. Then it does nothing… twice.

Seeds

Every run is built from a 7-character seed code, shown bottom right as you play and on the screen that ends a run. Write one down to deal it again.

Starting a Seeded Game

Press S on the title screen, type the seven characters, then RETURN to deal. DEL rubs out the last one, and RUN/STOP goes back to the title.

Complete a code and the three bosses it draws are named below it, so you can see what you are in for before you start.

A seeded run cannot set a high score.

Commands

Title Screen

RETURN	start a run
S	seed screen
H	high score table
F1	help
M	music on/off

Only an un-seeded run can post a high score. With no disk drive scores rank for the session but are not saved.

Playing a Blind

1–8	pick or unpick a card
RETURN	play the picked cards
X	discard the picked cards
S	sort by rank or by suit
F8	quit to the title
M	music on/off

RASTERJACK v1.0
Copyright 2026 Brandon Staggs
https://www.obliterator918.com/