The French Deck

I love card games. Six of my top ten board games are actually card games. I love the variety, the versatility, and the potential of a deck of cards. I have since I was a kid playing War and Go Fish, through my high school years of Spades and President, to today where Haggis and Mystery Rummy are two of my most played games despite the more than 100 I own.

A few weeks back I was participating in a discussion on BoardgameGeek about card games (if I had to guess, I think it was related to Tichu) when someone mentioned Pippoglyph playing cards. Specifically, they mentioned how Tichu is basically just a regular deck of cards, with four special cards that could easily be replaced with Jokers, or in the case of Pippoglyph decks, the X cards that come included. Needless to say, because of my abiding love for Tichu, I had to learn more. I have bought many Tichu decks in my decade of playing the game, but the idea that there was a set of cards that I could use for that as well as a number of other games I enjoy intrigued me.

All of this lead to me getting a pair of the best playing cards that I have ever owned. The two Pippoglyph decks are printed on fantastic stock with a linen finish (those air pockets that make the cards slide nicely in a shuffle), the artwork and design is great, and the box is sturdier than a standard Bicycle deck. Having them makes me want to play, which I always count as a big positive point. Acquiring them has thus set off a flurry of game play, and lose or win, I am enjoying every minute of it. Cribbage, Lamarckian Poker, Rummy, even "specialty" games like Haggis, Court of the Medici, and Kobayakawa... I just want to play them all.

That pocket-sized stack of cards contains within it dozens of games that I would sit down and play right now, and sometimes, as someone who maintains a fairly large collection of games, I forget how much I enjoy them. It is frankly amazing to me that something as simple as four suits of thirteen cards has that much variety in the experiences you can have - bluffing games, trick-taking games, climbing games, fishing games... and many of them are extremely deep, maintaining a replayability that can't be matched by many big box, "epic" board games.

Plus, there is a sense of history, a rustic universality, to the so-called "French deck." Everyone everywhere is familiar with it, everyone knows what it is, and many people are willing to play "cards" where they would be put off by a game about dragons or farming. That deck fits just as well into the image of wealthy businessmen dressed in tuxedos playing a public game of Baccarat as it does with a bunch of poor kids on a stoop slapping down a perfectly executed hand of Gin. You can find them being shuffled around by little old American ladies playing Bridge as easily little old Chinese men playing Big Two or beefy Russians playing Durak. A pack of 52 cards and two jokers crosses boundaries of class, race, and age and culture like little else.

My cards make me a part of that in some way. So do yours. And it's kind of rad.