Click Play, or press any game key.
Keyboard: arrows, X = A, Z = B, Enter = Start, A = Select. A gamepad works too.
Card Miner Heart of the Earth · NES Edition
Play the web original →
Somewhere 1000 meters down lies the Heart of the Earth. Card Miner is BX Foundry's digging card game:
tunnel down through 21 caverns, from the Surface Soil to the Core, pick up the playing cards buried in the dirt, and play poker hands
for points, energy and spells. This is the whole game rebuilt as a Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge,
running here in your browser, with new pixel art and an original chiptune soundtrack.
Your high scores stay in this browser.
Click Play, or press any game key.
The game
You hold five cards: a new one pushes the oldest out, unless you hold it. Digging costs energy, more the deeper you go, and walking your own tunnels is free. Play a hand at 0 energy, or use a Heal charge, or the run is over. Rocks fall when you dig under them, water floods your tunnels, and lava burns. Stop going down and the Wumpus comes for you; open a chest below 100 meters and the Golden Snake follows your trail to steal your gems.
Getting started
On the title screen press Start. Dig down from the surface and pick up cards as you go. When your five cards make a pair or better, press A. Six spells (Heal, Yob's Arrow, Blast, Light, Reveal, Rewind), chests full of gems, mushrooms, Dark Gnomes and 34 awards are waiting further down. The pause screen's HELP tab explains every tile and creature.
The cartridge
Written from scratch in 6502 assembly for an MMC3 cartridge with battery RAM, following the rules of the web game (version 29.39) and generating the same worlds from the same seeds. Five mine songs change with the depth. It runs on a real NES.
