Two Loons
Frustration — the card game that ruins friendships beautifully

The first game

The card game that ruins friendships beautifully.

Eleven levels. Eleven cards a hand. Only 2s are wild, and they know it. It's rummy with house rules mean enough to stay interesting: each level demands a different shape, and your lay-down has to satisfy all of it in one go.

And you're climbing your own ladder, not a shared one. Open your level this hand and you move up; don't, and you play the exact same level again next hand, however many hands that takes. Everybody's at the same table, dealt the same hands, chasing eleven different things.

  • Pass one device around the table, or everyone on their own with a five-character join code.
  • Get up mid-game. Your seat plays itself until you're back — politely, and badly.
  • At fifteen seconds a loon dives. At zero it surfaces and takes your turn for you.
  • Lowest score wins, so getting caught holding a fistful of face cards is its own punishment.

Play it now Free while it's in beta.

Why we built it

Some card games are a place. Ours is camp.

We play Frustration everywhere. It still tastes like camp — which is the whole reason it was worth building anything.

A deck of cards is a time machine with a very short range. Ours goes to a lake: a screen porch, a week of pancakes and bug spray, somebody quietly taking the entire table apart while pretending not to. That's not what the game is about. It's what the game is — you deal it and you're briefly back there.

The people are the hard part. They moved. They had kids. Work got worse. Somebody can usually give you two or three hours; what they can't give you is a fourteen-hour round trip, a whole weekend, cards until one in the morning and the drive home. So the game doesn't happen, and neither does the evening, and that's the actual loss — not the cards.

We're all on our phones anyway. This is a better thing to do with one than scrolling, and unlike scrolling it needs three other people. That's the thesis, such as it is: not a card game app, but a reasonable use of a phone that ends with you having spent two hours with somebody you miss.

It runs the other way too. One iPad going round a table is small kids learning cards and strategy, quietly, instead of winding each other up or disappearing into YouTube — which is why pass-and-play isn't the afterthought it looks like, and why the game is built to be safe for an eight-year-old. Most of what's below is that decision showing its work.

A player's loon card in the game: a 10 of spades with a loon portrait, the callsign Dock Goblin, the title The Strategist, five earned badges, and the line “You go out more than anyone has a right to.”
Your suit is worked out, not chosen. So is the rank, the title and every badge.
The back of the same card: hands, rounds won, matches won, best and worst classic, worst hand, feather rank, second-favourite game — and in large type, 186 hands with Dot.
And on the back, the only number we'd have built the rest of this to produce.
Another player's card lifted off the table: a 2 of clubs for Dot, Level 2, The Chaos, with “Nobody knows yet. Everybody starts out chaos.” underneath, and below the card, 312 hands played together.
Hold anybody's face at the table for half a second and this comes up. Yours included.
A band at the bottom of a round summary in the game, headed “While the cards are down”, offering two buttons: Lake or Ocean.
One hand in three ends on one of these. Two options, one tap, and you only see how the table split after you've answered — so nobody gets nudged toward the popular side before they've picked. An icebreaker that needs to know something about you isn't an icebreaker, it's a form.

Rank climbs on matches finished, never won

The person we want more of is the one who turns up and stays to the end. A ladder that pays for winning makes the best player's presence a cost to everybody else, and hands everybody else a reason to quit at level six. Finishing is what we're actually asking for, so finishing is what pays.

Everybody starts as a 2 — the wild card, worth the most against you, nobody quite sure what it's about to do. Which is a beginner exactly.

One number belongs to a pair of people

Hold somebody's face at the table and their card says 312 hands played together. Not a win rate. Not a ratio. A count. It only goes up, it cannot be lost, and it doesn't belong to either of you on your own.

On your own card it flips to the comparative version — who you've played the most cards with — because asking how many hands you've played with yourself is a silly question. That's the number the whole thing is for; everything else is scaffolding holding it up.

Your suit is derived, and it moves

Not a personality quiz. It comes off three things the game already knows: how often you go out, what your hands average, and how bad the worst one got. Play differently for a month and the card changes underneath you.

Under six hands everybody is Clubs, and the card says so out loud rather than pretending — “Nobody knows yet. Everybody starts out chaos.” Every suit states its reason underneath, which is what makes it feel earned instead of assigned.

Picked beats typed

Everything expressive on your card comes off a written list. That isn't a first line of defence, it's the entire moderation model: a pick-list cannot carry a slur, so there's nothing to filter, queue or review. The callsign rolls from two written columns for the same reason.

It's also why the answers are funny — the writing is ours on purpose rather than a stranger's on demand. Camp confession: “I will not stop talking about the hand I lost in 2019.” Era: Oregon Trail Survivor, which is optional, never a number, and never used for anything except the joke.

This is a game rated 8+, meant for your family, your oldest friends and the neighbours. Two questions earn a keyboard because a list of genres tells nobody anything, and they pay for it with a filter — no links, no contact details, no way to move a conversation somewhere nobody can see it.

With strangers, emoji only

Sit down with people you've never finished a match with and there is no text box — forty-nine emoji and nothing else. The keyboard unlocks by playing a whole match together.

It's the cheapest safety feature we have and the one we're happiest with, because it isn't a moderation queue. It's an order of operations.

And one rung that rewards nothing whatsoever

You can straighten the discard pile. It does nothing for your hand. There are eight ranks for it anyway, from Nudger up to Patron Saint of Straight Edges.

It's the one thing here you cannot be bad at — you can only decline to bother — which is exactly why it's the one place we let the joke be the whole point.

None of that is a moral position about games. It's what falls out of building for a number that can't go down: nobody has an incentive to quit over a total that only rises, and nobody needs protecting from a field with no keyboard in it.

At the table

Real captures of the real game, not mock-ups. If the page and the app ever disagree, the app is right and the page is late.

One turn: a card lifts off the stock pile, turns face up in the air, lands in the hand, and is then thrown onto the discard pile.
One whole turn. Draw it, look at it, decide you hate it, throw it back. Every card that changes hands travels, so you never miss one.
The top of the table as the turn changes: one player's portrait shrinks and dims while the next player's grows and lights up gold.
And the turn moving. One portrait shrinks, the next grows and takes the gold. Nobody has to be told whose go it is — a thing moved, so you looked.
A four-player Frustration table on a phone: green felt, four seats with avatars and card counts, a stock pile and a discard pile in the middle, and eleven cards fanned along the bottom.
Four seats, everyone's melds in their own quarter, and eleven cards you can actually read.
The levels tab in the game: eleven levels from Two Sets of 3 up to Run of 9, with the player's current one highlighted, and a card-value table underneath.
The whole ladder, and what it costs to be caught holding anything.
The table settings in the game: a turn timer, and toggles for Attentive Mode, Pro Mode, Icebreakers and Jokers Wild, each with a paragraph explaining what it changes.
House rules, as switches. Every one of them explains itself before you flip it.
The Loon Calls panel in the game: a seven-by-seven grid of emoji including suits, a feather and a duck, with a message box and a Send button underneath.
Loon calls: forty-nine of them. The message box only turns up once you've finished a match with everybody at the table.

Six shapes of game, before anybody starts arguing

A preset fills the level list in and then gets out of the way — untick the levels you haven't got time for, reorder the rest, and the match plays whatever's left.

A cupboard of ten decks. The dealer grabs a fresh handful every hand.

A deck is a back and its two jokers — they travel together, the way a real deck does. Beyond that they're identical: every one holds the same fifty-two faces, exactly like a casino shoe, so knowing a card came off the Moonrise deck tells you precisely nothing. Which is the only reason we're allowed to make them all different.

A jack, a queen and a king. Every suit gets the same three, in its own colours.

Ten jokers, two to a deck. Switch on Jokers Wild and you play with the pair belonging to whichever decks are on the table.

The worst parts of a card night are all logistics.

The good parts happen at a kitchen table at eleven at night and can't be improved on. The rest is admin, and admin is the bit that ends the evening early.

Two loons on a lake at sunset, beside a campfire, two camp chairs and a Two Loons mug
The target. Everything in this picture except the paper deck.

Nobody shuffles

No bent corners, no missing joker, no deck that's been in a drawer since 1994 and smells like it.

Nobody waits

Go get a beer. Go put a kid to bed. The table keeps its shape and your seat covers for you until you're back.

Nobody's crammed in

Same room, better chairs. Sit on the dock, in the hammock, in the one good recliner — you're still at the table.

Nobody ends it early

Somebody leaving at nine doesn't kill the game. Neither does starting one that takes three days to finish.

You still have to argue about the rules. That part we would never automate.

Loonaholics and Loonbassadors

There isn't a mailing list, a launch event or a countdown. There are two loons and an Instagram account.

Available now

Become a Loonaholic

Follow along and you'll see each game as it lands, plus whatever the loons are doing to each other that week.

Not yet

Become a Loonbassador

Bring people to the table, wear the badge next to your name. It needs real accounts before it can mean anything, so it's honestly post-beta.

Everybody at the lake. Pick one, before somebody takes the good one.

Twenty-four, and yes — the first two are Chuck and Dot, the pair on the studio page. The picker still calls them Loon and Lady Loon, because we named them after it was written and haven't gone back in yet.

Badges you can already earn at the table

And a callsign, rolled from two written columns rather than typed. Dock Goblin. Campfire Lawyer. Screen Door Inspector. Marshmallow Sheriff. Nobody gets to invent one, which is both the safety feature and, we think, the funnier outcome.