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Guandan

掼蛋搭子 · 好牌友 · 常相聚“Good partners, often together”

Guandan is a four-player partnership card game from Jiangsu. This version adds a quick mode that settles one deal in six to ten minutes, three AI partners trained by self-play, and Steam friend lobbies.

Status In development Build Playable Store page Not published
A Guandan table in a painted teahouse, with the hint panel open showing a suggested play.
Captured in Godot 4.7 from a running build, 2026-09-10. Chinese interface shown.

Where it is

In development, with a build that runs. The rules engine and the AI feature encoder have been ported from JavaScript to Rust and cleared every conformance gate, including a byte-for-byte differential run over 20,000 matches and 18.3 million steps with zero mismatches. That milestone was signed off on 2026-09-10, and the work moved on to packaging the AI ladder and building out the Godot interface.

Single-player plays end to end: menu, table, hints, pause, tribute, scoring, album, save and resume. Online lobbies exist and work between friends, but they have not been through much real-world network testing yet.

No date, no price, no store page. Guandan has not been released and is not on sale. Its Steam page is not public. No release date, price, review score or player count has been announced, and nothing here should be read as one.

The AI partners

The three opponents are not scripted bots. Their weights come from thirty days of uninterrupted self-play: 680,574 training steps across 5.576 billion hands, finished without a restart.

The five difficulty settings are not one model with the numbers turned down. They are five separate snapshots from that training run plus two hand-written rule engines, and the gap between each pair was measured rather than guessed.

TierWin rate against the tier below
T2 Competent64.1%
T3 Strong58.5%
T4 Master61.3%
T5 Ace57.4%

What those numbers are not. They were measured by having the five tiers play each other on a frozen deck seed. They describe how these AIs rank among themselves. None of them has ever played a human or an outside bot, so none of this says anything about how they would do against you. Published research on Guandan agents still puts the strongest known systems below an intermediate human player.

Modes

  • Quick deal. One deal, six to ten minutes, no tribute phase.
  • Agreed session. Two, three, five or eight deals, scored on total levels gained.
  • Full game. The long climb from 2 up to A, saveable and resumable.
  • Tutorial. One deal, about five minutes.
  • Replay. Read back a saved match report.

The album

Thirty-six things that genuinely happen at a Guandan table are collectible: the four-king bomb, the ten-card bomb, a straight flush, the tribute card you handed over coming back as part of the bomb that beats you. Rarity is measured by simulation rather than assigned by feel. A run of five cards in one suit turns up roughly once every four deals; seven of a kind lands about once in 10,929; the largest bomb the rules allow has not appeared once in four million sampled deals.

There is no gacha, no in-app purchase and no currency. Rarity changes the colour of a card's border and nothing else.

Learning it

Guandan's rule set is the usual reason people bounce off it. There is a 32-page illustrated handbook, one idea per page, and the combination pages can be tried out directly. During a hand, pressing H asks for a suggestion and an explanation of why that play.

Playing with people

Steam friend lobbies, with the number of deals agreed up front. If someone drops, an AI takes the seat and hands it back when they return.

Fact sheet

TitleGuandan
Chinese title掼蛋搭子
Developer237 Studio
GenreCard game, casual, multiplayer
EngineGodot 4.7.2
Rust core (GDExtension)
InferenceONNX, pure Rust, no external runtime
PlatformsWindows x86_64
macOS universal
Linux x86_64
Languages简体中文, English
Interface and subtitles
Players1 to 4
Store pageNot published
Release dateNot announced
PriceNot announced
MonetisationNone planned beyond the purchase
Team size1
Press contact[email protected]

Media

From the running build

Captured in Godot on 2026-09-10. The interface is shown in Chinese; an English interface is also in the build.

The Guandan table with a hand of cards along the bottom and three AI opponents seated around it.
The table, cards selected
The end-of-deal screen showing finishing order and levels gained.
End of a deal
The full match result screen listing finishing order, levels gained and the bombs played.
Match result
The main menu in English, with Quick Play, New Game, Continue, Multiplayer, How to Play, Album and Settings.
Main menu, English

Press are welcome to use these with a credit to 237 Studio.

Follow it

Nothing to follow yet

Guandan has no Steam page, Discord or social account of its own. When a store page goes up it will be linked from here first. Until then, [email protected] reaches the person building it.

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