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Heckadeck initial thoughts!

I suffer from a particular brand of FOMO and gullibility for things that promise to replace a bunch of other things in my home. I guess I ultimately have some neuroses around my possessions and around surplus culture in general. Also my apartment is super tiny. So lured in by the idea that a “game system” can replace all my other games, I’ve of course gotten a bunch of game systems without getting rid of the other games. Some of these game systems are multidecks; I’ve got the the Proxy Suit deck, the Everdeck, Glyph, the five-suited deck from Pyramid Arcade and so many traditional decks and tarot decks that it’s ridiculous. On top of having some specific single-purpose decks like Parade and The Bottle Imp (and both Pairs and Dalmuti even though you can play one with the other).

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:

Each card is one thing

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.

De-emphasizing proxying

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.

House-rule affirming

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.

Duplicates but not really

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”.

A bad card back

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!

Difficult-to-remember suit-ranking

The order is diamonds, swords, clubs, acorns, hearts, clouds, spades and planets. OK so the good thing is that:

1. The rule booklet does have a suggested order

2. That same order is used again and again and one can learn it eventually (we used it for Showboat and I think I already pretty much know it)

3. The order is printed on the side of the box which can be kept in view as a player aid

4. The trad suits are ordered in bridge order diamonds, clubs, hearts and spades (not to be confused with the poker order I learned as a kid which somehow was clubs diamonds spades hearts although that mighta been local, or the Ninety-Nine order which is diamonds, spades, hearts, and clubs). But that bridge order is preserved here but with the new blue and green suits slotted in.

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.

Quality

My friend already bent a corner on the seven of hearts.

Overall

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.