52 Pickup
Every card on the floor. Put them back before the clock does.
A full deck thrown across a green felt table, and the job of picking it all back up - sometimes in a particular order, always faster than last time.
- Genre
- Card / Speed puzzle
- Built with
- Godot 4.7
- Orientation
- Portrait
- Price
- Free, ad supported
What it is
About 52 Pickup
The oldest joke in card games, made into an actual game. Fifty-two cards hit the table face up and overlapping, and you have to clear them in the order the level asks for. Ascending. Alternating colours. Suits in rotation. Eighty-four levels of it, each one a different way to make a shuffled deck hard to read.
There is not a single image file, font file or audio file in the whole project. The cards, the felt, the title lettering and every sound are generated at runtime, which is why it is a few dozen kilobytes and why it stays sharp on any screen you put it on.
Design notes
Why it works the way it does
84 hand-built levels
Each one names an order and a rule set. None of them are generated, and every one is verified solvable to all 52 cards by an automated pass before the build ships.
Drawn entirely in code
No sprites, no atlas, no font. Vector cards rendered at whatever resolution the device asks for, so it is as crisp on a tablet as it is on a phone.
A hint that actually helps
Stuck on a table where nothing reads, the hint highlights the next legal card rather than solving it for you.
Runs on anything
GL Compatibility renderer. It runs on old integrated graphics and five-year-old phones.
Screens
From the running build
Every shot is captured from the real game. Nothing here is a mock-up.
Questions
Things people ask
Is it free?
Yes. It is ad supported, with an optional one-off purchase that removes the ads.
Does it need an internet connection?
Only to serve ads. Every level is playable offline.
Is there an account to make?
No. There is no login, no profile and no server holding anything of yours.
Paperwork
52 Pickup policies
Every game has its own privacy policy and its own terms, written from what that specific build actually does rather than a single studio-wide document that has to cover everything.
- Data collected: advertising identifiers, anonymous usage events, crash diagnostics — never a name, an email address or a contact list
- Account required: No — there is no login and no profile
- Ads: Yes, from Google AdMob, with a consent prompt where the law requires one
- In-app purchases: Optional, one-off, never required to finish anything
Elsewhere
