Card Path

Every game gives you five rounds. Each round shows two real sports cards side by side. Pick one — your pick enters your collection. What you pick steers what you see next: the following round is weighted toward cards that share attributes with your prior picks (same sport, same decade, rookie status, same value tier). After five picks you have a five-card collection, and the game scores you on two things: total fair-market value, and a coherence bonus for themed collections.

The game checks your five-card collection for shared themes: all the same sport (+40% value bonus), all rookie cards (+40%), all from the same decade (+30%), all in the same value tier (+25%). You can stack bonuses — an all-baseball-all-rookie collection gets both the sport and rookie bonuses. Coherent collections score materially higher than grab-bag collections of the same raw FMV, which rewards committing to a theme in early rounds.

Daily mode uses a date-seeded starting pair — every player who opens Card Path on the same day faces the same Round 1 pair, and the branching weights evolve the same way. Your final score is comparable across players. You get one daily run per day. Free Play generates a fresh starting pair every game with no branching constraints, so you can replay infinitely and experiment with different themes. Both modes feed the same lifetime stats.

After you make a pick, the game computes attribute weights based on what you’ve collected so far. If you’ve picked two baseball rookies, the next pair heavily favors baseball rookies. If your picks are spread across sports, the branching is looser. The branching is deliberate: it rewards players who commit to a theme and makes it harder to accidentally finish with a coherent collection. The mechanic is similar to a hobby-shop window: you walked in looking for vintage basketball, the shop owner shows you more vintage basketball.

Your final score is (total FMV of five cards) multiplied by (1 + sum of coherence bonuses). The grade ladder is S = over $5,000, A = $2,000-$5,000, B = $1,000-$2,000, C = $500-$1,000, D = $200-$500, F = under $200. For a well-themed $500 collection, the coherence multiplier can push you from C into B territory. High-value grails pulled without a theme grade lower than modest but coherent sets.

After the game ends, the share button copies a small emoji summary of your picks: the card sport as an emoji (⚾ 🏀 🏈 🏒), a rookie indicator (R) or blank, and your final grade. Perfect for dropping into a group chat or a hobby Discord without leaking the specific cards you pulled.

No. Card Streak (G-018) is an infinite higher-or-lower value game with no collection building — one wrong call ends the run. Card Path is a fixed five-round collection builder where every pick counts and coherence bonuses reshape the optimization problem. Card Streak is pure binary value-comparison; Card Path is about theme-committing vs value-chasing trade-offs. Completely different mechanic family.

Card Trade-Up Challenge (G-026) is one-way — you always trade up in value, and the challenge is finding the path. Card Bracket Challenge (G-045) is a 16-card tournament. Card Path is neither: it is a five-round collection builder with biased branching that rewards theme commitment. The core tension — grail chase vs theme coherence — does not exist in any other game in the CardVault catalog.