Calvinball cards
Sep. 27th, 2026 05:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtree(Like usual, this is me making the previous post I meant to make, because I found it in my drafts upon starting the next post. Notes on working at Book Hound: some other time.)
The other week, for their 40th, my flatmate E. made a deck of blank playing cards, drew faces for a few of them, and then invited a bunch of friends over to eat cake and spend a couple of hours drawing playing cards, before playing a game with them. Were there any rules for what should be on the cards? Not really! When we'd got to the last twenty cards of the hundred-card stack, E. introduced a requirement that only suit cards could be made from then on, just to make sure every suit actually had more than one card in it. Drawing skill was variable. E is a cartoonist; I'm a doodler; my flatmate S. spent the entire time tracing four detailed frog warriors he found on the internet, and then was surprised to learn that several other people had also drawn entries in the suit of frogs. The resulting game was a lot of fun.
There were some poker hands:
There were various instructions:
There were some chess pieces:
There were some modifications of existing suits:
And some new suits:
![The Page, Ace, Quen [sic], and King of Cards](https://landingtree.dreamwidth.org/file/480x480/34374.jpg "The suit of Cards")
And plenty more!
Other extant suits included worms, grubs, shades, Shrouds of Turin, and the color blue. We mostly played the game as Snap because no one had made a card that said 'The game stops being Snap,' but I'd be curious to go back and see how it works with trick-taking.
But all this is now a month past. Yesterday the flat had a cupcake-icing party for flatmate S's birthday, which I suppose I could also share photos of, only then we'd be caught up to the present which is clearly impossible.
The other week, for their 40th, my flatmate E. made a deck of blank playing cards, drew faces for a few of them, and then invited a bunch of friends over to eat cake and spend a couple of hours drawing playing cards, before playing a game with them. Were there any rules for what should be on the cards? Not really! When we'd got to the last twenty cards of the hundred-card stack, E. introduced a requirement that only suit cards could be made from then on, just to make sure every suit actually had more than one card in it. Drawing skill was variable. E is a cartoonist; I'm a doodler; my flatmate S. spent the entire time tracing four detailed frog warriors he found on the internet, and then was surprised to learn that several other people had also drawn entries in the suit of frogs. The resulting game was a lot of fun.
There were some poker hands:
There were various instructions:
There were some chess pieces:
There were some modifications of existing suits:
And some new suits:
![The Page, Ace, Quen [sic], and King of Cards](https://landingtree.dreamwidth.org/file/34374.jpg "The suit of Cards")
And plenty more!
Other extant suits included worms, grubs, shades, Shrouds of Turin, and the color blue. We mostly played the game as Snap because no one had made a card that said 'The game stops being Snap,' but I'd be curious to go back and see how it works with trick-taking.
But all this is now a month past. Yesterday the flat had a cupcake-icing party for flatmate S's birthday, which I suppose I could also share photos of, only then we'd be caught up to the present which is clearly impossible.
