BURNER

BURNER

Every profile burns. Make the money before it does.

In Port Alder, a card game called Beastbound is bigger than sports. Chase cards sell for the price of a car, weekend conventions are packed with collectors carrying binders full of cash, and a marketplace app sends strangers to parking garages at night to trade cardboard for money.

You're broke, so you steal from all of it.

Work the floor. Palm singles at the card shop. Swap a graded slab for a fake while the vendor looks away. Walk out of the con with a booster box in your backpack. The only limits are how much you can carry and how many eyes are on you.

Work the app. Agree to a deal, show up, and leave with both the card and the cash. Then fight them or outrun them. Either way they leave a review, reviews kill profiles, and new profiles cost money. Burn it and start a new one.

Fence it before it's too hot. Every stolen card goes out on a BOLO with its serial number and your description. Dump it at the pawn shop for pennies, sit on it until the heat dies down, or try a clean sale and hope the buyer isn't a cop.

Four kinds of heat, all feeding each other:

- Suspicion: every store remembers your face.

- BOLO: every hot card is tracked.

- Reputation: every burned profile costs you.

- Police radar: keep pushing and the patrols follow you to your meetups, plain-clothes cops show up at the cons, and eventually they raid your apartment.

Go big. Break into stores at night. Run your own table at the con. Get on Dee's crew for planned heists: she walks you through the job on a marked-up map, then you sneak, hide and get the goods out to the van. Pay rent every two weeks and stack $50,000 in your safe, or take on the Marchetti Job.

First-person. Single-player. Everything is fictional: the cards, the stores and the people.