A new multi-purpose deck is the “Heckadeck” that I finally gave in and got! And it’s great!
It has some pros and cons:
I love this. When these multi-game decks first started coming on the scene it was so tempting to make the cards so overloaded. “Oh, for this game you need to look at the number in this corner, and ignore these blue numbers but treat these red numbers as if they were black”. Heckadeck doesn’t go anywhere near that. Each card is one thing. A jack of diamonds is unambigously a Jack of Diamonds. A Queen of Clouds is a Queen of Clouds. Easy to use and a joy to play.
Sometimes “extra info” can be good like how in The Bottle Imp the money cards are marked. That’s the flipside here, this doesn’t have that. But it’s hard to make extra info work well for a multipurpose deck.
The li’l booklet for this and the community is less about the “Oh if you turn the cards upside down and squint you can sort of play Battle Line” and more about expanding traditional cards and making them more goofy and lucky. It’s less “this is for prototyping your own games or pirating other designer games” and more “hey kids! You know how to play Hearts? Here’s ‘Hearts and Clouds’!”. Fun approach and if this helps the deck I’m for it. We prototypers & DIY:ers can still have our fun.
The houserule-affirming approach taken in the booklet and in the deck design itself also lends itself to houseruling and changing up proxied designer games! We can play “Lost Cities”… Or “Lost Cities with Travelers and Hunters” as multi-suited handshake cards! We can play Parade, or “Parade with Darkness”! There’s so many weird and fun li’l extra arrows and talismans and travelers and conjurers and all kinds of adorable fun.
One thing that the Proxy Suit Deck did right but none of the others get right is that a lot of designer games and home made games make good use of duplicate cards. Cards that are exactly the same! That’s what makes it possible to play Skull or Time Bomb II in a way that isn’t really with Everdeck, Glyph… or with Heckadeck since the “duplicates” here aren’t really duplicates. There are two red arrows but they’re slightly different, and same goes for the two red talismans. Too close to be meaningfully distinct in almost any game, but still different enough to make the “relies on exact duplicate” games like Skull and friends unplayable.
But games where it’s OK that all the duplicates are distinguishable it can still be useful to have these pseudo-duplicates; it can be good didactics, you never have to be like “OK, threes, twos and ones are all Frobnicators”, here you can just use the arrows or the talismans for that.
It’s also just plain flavorfully adorable to have this mix of some cards with a number, some with a letter, and some that have neither. It just looks good on the table, curious enough to be alien but familiar enough to be haunting. I love it. It seems like you could play Pratchett’s “Onion” game with this easily for example. Sounds like something straight out of a fantasy novel. “I capture your three of hearts with my queen of clouds”.
This card back is a little bit dizzyness-inducing, but thanks to the thick borders it’s not nearly as bad as the Proxy Suit Deck or the Heiko edition of Glory to Rome. Those games are out right criminal in how seizure-triggering they are when you’re fanning the card backs where this is for the most part fine!
But there’s a bigger problem!
We find that card backs that are aaaaalmost rotationally symmetrical 180˚ but there’s a tiny li’l detail breaking the symmetry is the worst of all worlds. Completely symmetrical is great (I used to collect Bicycle decks) and completely asymmetrical decks like Radlands are also OK. But here there’s only a tiny li’l difference in the center of the card back making it easy to cheat.
Here’s a card trick for kids: rotate the cards so all the card backs are rotated the same way before hand. Spread out the deck and have your mom pick a card. As she’s looking at it, rotate the deck 180° so when she puts it back, that replaced card is the only card with that card back rotation. Then as you’re shuffling the deck keep it that way and then after a while you can pick out her card because it’s the only card rotated that way.
Or for cheaters you can put all face cards one way and number cards the other and all kinds of stuff. It’s not a good back!
The order is diamonds, swords, clubs, acorns, hearts, clouds, spades and planets. OK so the good thing is that:
So much for the good news. The new order is… not alphabetical! For anglophones, the bridge order is also the alphabetical order, and the same is true for the Island Deck’s suit order. Here there’s no such linguistic ordering.
Also acorns and planets look too similar. Way too similar. We’ve mixed them up several times.
My friend already bent a corner on the seven of hearts.
I really like this deck! I was late to the party for I don’t even know why but it really has a lot of fun parts to it!
And I’m still stuck with an ever-growing board game collection–the Everdeck is still my only deck for Hanafuda or Hanabi, and probably the best bet for The Mind or No Thanks, and the Glyph is my only way to play Decktet games, for example. Maybe one of the days I sober up from this consumtion frenzy and end up with just one of these decks–and that one deck might well be a normal tarot or even a normal card deck.
Even some of my favorite board games like Homeworlds, Hive, and Ghosts can be played with cards, using cards as playing pieces. Although all my friends always refuse to do that since using the real version is its own kind of experiental fun.
But for right now I wanna try to keep exploring this deck. It’s way more easy to actually use in play than the other multidecks.
I wanted to come up with flavorful and weird mechanics for all the special cards beyond just “it’s a wildcard”.
So these rules are complicated in a way that’s hopefully fun and interesting. If you want simple & minimal then don’t read on and instead use traditional cards.
These card ranking house rules should work with a couple of different trick taking games. I intend to first try them out with the two handed whist game common here in Sweden and Norway (each player has ten face down cards covered by ten face up cards, and a hand of six hand cards, and as the face up cards are played the cards underneath them are turned face up and made available; this is also a game where trump suit varies over deals) and maybe some other trick taking games too.
Here are the seventy cards used.
Clubs, spades, diamonds: they work as normal. The normal thirteen cards each, plus watcher which counts as all suits.
Hearts: a longer suit which also has zero, beast, and eleven. Beast goes between eleven and jack as in other heckadeck games. Also use the hunter and traveler that’s shared with clouds.
Clouds: a shorter suit that only has two, beast, queen, hunter, traveler, and ace.
Rankings of normal suited cards: I haven’t made my mind up where the king goes (between jack and queen as other heckadeck games, or above queen as in traditional card games) but the ace for sure is high and goes above the traveler and even above the talisman (see below) but below the omnihedron and the watcher.
Hunter and traveler in clouds and hearts: They belong to both colors. Traveler beats hunter, and both beat the traditional set of face cards, which in turn beat the beast and the eleven. It goes “ArHuTaTra”: arrow beaten by hunter beaten by talisman beater by traveler.
The darkness: An unknown card. It does not prevent any other suit from being short suited, and you don’t have to be short suited or follow in order to play it. You never have to play it (unless it’s your last card) and you always can play it, so it’s a very flexible and good card in that regard. Once every card has been played to the trick, determine the suit and rank of the darkness randomly. I’m gonna use the “roll the deck” dice but you can use a poker die or roll a d20 on a list of cards or pull from a secondary, tiny solitaire deck or you can have use the unused Planet cards to pull from to determine rank, and the unused beast cards of clubs, spades, and diamonds, along with an unused red joker, to determine the suit. Important rule: it can only resolve to a traditional, pre-Heckadeck card. So it’s not resolved until all the cards have been played to the trick, and after it’s resolved it acts if it was that card all along. This means it can win or lose. If it is led, any other card can be legally played to it. Like normal tricks, the card that was played first determine the suit of the trick (which in turn can be trumped). So if the darkness was retroactively determined to be say the six of diamonds, well, it beat any lower diamond or any non-diamond played to it if it was led, or if it was followed, it can only win if the other cards in the trick are lower diamonds, or if diamonds are trumps this deal and the six was the highest diamond. Uh. Kinda hard to explain but the general principle is: 1. It can follow any card, 2. Any card can follow it, 3. Then it’s revealed which card it was all along and the winner is determined accordingly.
The watcher: Belongs to all suits and is the highest card in the deck, wins everything. You’re not short suited in any suit as long as you have an unplayed watcher so if it’s your last card in the led suit, you have to play it (and win). When led, any suited card can follow but will lose.
The conjurer: still a pretty good card but strictly a worst-of-both-worlds hybrid of watcher and darkness: counts as all suits in hand and until resolved, but is resolved exactly like the darkness. It’s a darkness that “can’t hide”.
The “whatever you want” card. If you’ve already scribbled on yours, use an unused green joker instead. Like watcher and conjurer, it can only copy one of traditional 52 cards. Unlike them, it’s not random, it’s your choice. Inspired by cat in the box and absurdle but I’ll explain it in a way that doesn’t require you to know those games: You have to decide what you want this card to be but your choice is secret and changeable until you play the card but it needs to be follow these rules: it can not copy a suit you’ve claimed to have been short in. Nor can it copy any specific card you’ve already played or a card you still have (that you know that you have; some games give you more cards as the game goes along). Cards opponents have played or still have in hand? Totally fair game! Unlike conjurer/watcher, you need to say what this card is as you play it and it needs to be a legal play at that time.
Arrows, talisman, and omnihedron:
Arrows: you need to be shortsuited or lead with them (they “wedge in” where your other suits can’t go); talismans/omnihedron: you can’t be shortsuited or lead with them (they “reflect” your other suits).
Rank-wise, arrows go just under hunters, and talismans go inbetween hunters and travelers, and omnihedron beats aces and travelers and only loses to watcher. Suits don’t matter for them once they’ve been legally played to the trick.
Suit wise, arrows can not follow any other suit. They only played when you are short the lead suit, or they can led as the first card to a trick.
Talisman and omnihedron work completely differently than arrows. When following, they make all the suits you already have longer. When voided or led which you can only do when forced to (because it’s your only remaining cards), that’s bad and they’re unreliable. Deets: When following, if you have other suited cards of the led suit you could play, you can play a talisman or omnihedron instead. They copy the led suit in that case but keep their talisman or omnihedron rank. Leading them or voiding them is not good, it’s not even allowed if you have other cards you could lead or void. The penality is that the opponent to the left decides freely whether the talisman / omnihedron card wins or loses the trick (or, in co-op or solitaire game, pick whatever is worse for the mission).
If there are two or more copies of the exact same card in a trick, thanks to the darkness, conjurer, and/or “whatever you want” card, or arrows or talismans, the card that was added last to the trick is a real one and wins over the “impostor”. The special cards don’t get a new timestamp when they’re resolved. They keep the timestamp of when they were played.
If you only add two arrows and two talismans, for example the green ones, this means the deck is… Um… Seventy cards! You can add in any of the other cards (more arrows, more talismans, more suits, elongate any of the existing suits) and still follow these rules for how all the weird cards work. The seventy card deck is also a strict superset of the normal deck so you can play the first round normally and then add the 18 new cards: 0, 11, B of hearts, 2, B, Q, A of clouds, H and T of hearts-and-clouds, C, D, W, whatever, as specials, and both green arrows and green talismans, and the omnihedron.
So in the specific two-handed whist variant I was talking about earlier, instead of ten facedown, ten face up, six hand cards, here you’ll have, let’s say say fourteen face down, fourteen face up, and seven hand cards.
Examples:
Alice plays the queen of clubs! Bob still has a bunch of other club cards so he can safely play a talisman and win the trick!
Bob then plays the ten of spades! Alice is short-suited spades so she can play the arrow and win the trick!
Alice then plays the queen of diamonds! Bob has plenty of hearts, diamonds, and spades, but plays the darkness, which, once no more cards are addded, is randomly rolled and it becomes a nine of hearts. If hearts isn’t trump this particular deal, Alice wins the trick!
Alice then plays the jack of clubs! Bob’s only club left is the conjurer which he has to play. But then the conjurer gets rolled to be another nine of hearts and loses that trick too! You’re not short suited anything as long you have a conjurer and/or watcher. They both count as all suits in hand. Even though the conjurer’s suit is a li’l fluid.
Alice then plays the “whatever you want” card; she can’t say it’s a spade because she already revealed she’s short-suited spades, she can’t say it’s a queen of clubs, a queen of diamonds, or a jack of clubs either. She can’t copy any of the cards she has in her hand either. If she, for example, does not have a nine of hearts, she can say nine of hearts even though Bob already played two nine of hearts cards and might still have the real one in his hand. Which he does, and he plays it, and wins the trick since his 9♥︎ was the last one played.