Deck of Time Deals Blackjack, Time Travel and DOS-Era Nonsense
Apparently blackjack was getting far too comfortable with modern hardware.
Deck of Time is a new humorous card game created for MS-DOS, combining blackjack with a deliberately 1990s PC aesthetic and enough weirdness to ensure nobody mistakes it for serious casino software. The game was created by RubenRetro for the second MS-DOS Club DOS Game Programming Contest, whose theme this year is time travel.
Underneath the jokes is a genuinely old-school DOS game. Deck of Time is written in C, uses Allegro 4.2.3, requires only a 386 or faster, 4 MB of RAM and VGA graphics, and will run under MS-DOS 5.0 or later. In other words, your forgotten beige box in the attic may finally have an important job again.
The game takes the familiar blackjack formula and wraps it in a much less familiar presentation involving time-themed nonsense, an intimidating dealer and multiple outcomes. There is even an intentionally retro-style age check, because apparently getting into a DOS blackjack game in 2026 should involve proving that you survived enough of the 1990s to understand the references.
Deck of Time was published on 11 September 2026 and received an update on 16 September. A downloadable DOS version is available, along with a Windows x86 build, but you can also play the whole thing directly in a modern browser through itch.io.
So yes: we have reached the point where people are developing completely new blackjack games for MS-DOS again.
Nature is healing.