9 Kings Leaves Early Access on November 12 With Joker Mode and 130+ Cards
The 1.0 content list is the measure of whether a year and a half of early access converted a small deck-builder into a game with four distinct modes and a card pool well past its original plan.
Reporting from 1 source: Game Spark.
Hooded Horse and Sidekick Publishing will end early access for Sad Socket's 9 Kings on November 12, 2026, about a year and a half after it entered early access in May 2025. Version 1.0 adds a fourth mode, Joker Mode, where players set their own rules, and expands the pool to 130+ cards, up from the originally planned 81, plus 140+ edicts, 110+ perks, 80+ quests, and 140+ cosmetics.
Joker Mode is the new arrival in the 1.0 build, framed as the custom ruleset players had been waiting on: build your own nine-card deck, adjust the game's rules, and play outside the standard structure. The other three modes are single-player against dozens of difficulty levels, online multiplayer with ranks, and Quest Mode across nine lands.
Perks now split between competitive and single-player progression. More than 30 new edicts join the pool, giving each king nine unique edicts and aligning common and rainbow edicts to multiples of nine.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.