Playing Card Tarot turns the deck on the kitchen table into a real tarot instrument. There's no esoteric 78-card Rider–Waite knowledge required — the reader picks up an ordinary 52-card playing deck, the app handles the spread mechanics, and the interpretation comes back with full AI-written commentary in the cadence of a thoughtful cartomancer.

What it does

• Three live spread types — single-card pulls, three-card past/present/future, and the full ten-card Celtic Cross with animated reveals and 3D flip transitions.
• AI-enhanced interpretation on every reading via OpenRouter, streamed in with a typewriter cadence so the reading actually reads rather than dumping a wall of text.
• Combination engine that recognises pairs, trips, quads, and curated card-pair interactions, then layers ribbon annotations over the spread to surface them.
• Interactive 52-card legend — every card in the deck is clickable, with its meaning, suit symbolism, and pair interactions pre-written.
• Passkey-first auth using WebAuthn, with passphrase fallback and email-based recovery — passwords never need to exist unless the user wants one.
• Theme system with dual accent colors, light/dark toggle, glassmorphism, and animated suit-symbol backgrounds that recolor live when accents change.
• Stripe-backed economy — free AI on every reading, plus optional credit packs and monthly / six-month premium subscriptions for higher-tier models and daily allowances.
• Reading history with paginated previews, 3D outcome cards, and AI summaries that survive across sessions.
• Admin panel covering user management, API key rotation, AI tooling, a reading browser, analytics, and system settings.

How it ships

The whole app is vanilla PHP 8 — no Laravel, no Symfony, no framework — fronted by Apache with mod_rewrite and a single index.php entry point routing into hand-written controllers. State lives in MariaDB; migrations are plain numbered SQL files. The frontend is vanilla JavaScript + Tailwind CSS with custom card-animation and theme layers, no build step beyond Tailwind itself. Custom artwork — the skeleton-royal court cards, the joker, the splash — was drawn for the project and ships as WebP. Lucide SVG icons are inlined through a PHP helper. The PWA manifest + service worker make the whole thing installable to a phone home screen, where it behaves like a native reading app.

Why it exists

Cartomancy with playing cards is older than the tarot deck most people picture, and a 52-card deck is sitting in almost every drawer in the house. The app makes the practice approachable without sanding off the texture: the meanings are real, the spreads are real, the AI commentary stays in voice instead of flattening every reading into the same vague horoscope. It's a free tool first — credits and premium tiers exist so the AI bill is sustainable, not as a paywall around the actual reading.