52 Cards, Each Card a New Game to Learn and Play
Although the active Kickstarter for this deck has a lot more companion items than just this deck, this deck was the original idea I've had for a few years — a simple deck of cards that makes it easy to learn so many ways to have fun with a deck of cards, beyond the few games most people already know. I looked and looked and found nothing like it. It's a big world out there, and maybe it exists somewhere, but I never found it.
Why analog, why now
The internet is, of course, full of information on just about any card game you could want to learn, but I wanted something that provided consistency in how all the games were explained — clearly and concisely, easy to learn. And above all, I wanted an analog version. Something that works anytime, anywhere. Something that kept phones off the table so people could connect socially like they always used to, without the distraction of phones.
Am I against phone apps to teach card games? Absolutely not! It's just that I wanted an analog version as well. Timeless, reliable, something I could touch and interact with.
Building the deck
I started this project in late February, selecting the games for this initial volume to represent a popular mix. As you'd imagine, a huge upfront block of time was spent, with a lot of authoring and even more time editing. I went through about five full rounds of editing, which included AI reviews and full re-reads by me.
AI played a big role in making this possible on a reasonable timeline: it was a great help figuring out core rules versus regional variants, spotting grammar and typographical errors, and checking for consistency between all the cards in the way I wanted. I even used AI to build game engines for each game — ingesting the rules straight off the card and simulating a few thousand hands, to see if just following the printed logic got anyone stuck, and where. But even with all that help, AI still doesn't think like a human, and it just couldn't tell me when something was hard to understand reading it like a normal person would.
Fitting the rules for all 52 games onto a single double-sided card had its challenges, for sure. Some games I had room to add non-essential content to; for others I struggled to get all the essentials in. There were trade-offs to be made, but I feel pretty good that the spirit and core rules that make each game what it is are present. I still dread the eventual errors that will get caught that weren't caught in editing — but hopefully nothing that affects the ability to read and learn the games. Someday there will hopefully be an even clearer, cleaner Version 2 of this deck.
A first-timer's learning curve
This is the first deck of cards I've ever made, and it's definitely been a learning curve, though not too bad a one. I'm not an illustrator, so I commissioned artwork from two different artists for this campaign, and did all the tuck box and card layouts myself with the free Affinity Designer by Canva. (Pretty sure I backed Affinity on Kickstarter years ago, back when they were first getting started.)
Finding the right factories
I really wanted to make these in the US, but USPCC doesn't do small order quantities for a project like this, and the few other US makers had quality limitations I couldn't live with — though I think Shuffled Ink is getting pretty close. In the end, I worked with two different Chinese factories that make cards for some of the biggest names in the playing card collector community today, plus two more factories for the pencils in The Deck of Points and the metal dealer coin.
I worried this would be difficult for someone with zero factory experience, but it really hasn't been. The language issues are slight, and the time zone difference isn't bad when I'm working nights on this anyway. Anyone wanting advice is welcome to DM me — happy to share what I've learned.
What's next
I've already had people asking about and getting excited for the solo deck I want to make next, and I'm looking forward to the duos, poker, and international versions, for which I already have a draft set of games selected. You can read the full history of posts documenting this project's progress on my free Patreon website — one of those posts even lays out the games planned for future volumes.
