Dicecards
The Kickstarter page for Dicecards bills it as “The World’s Geekiest Dice Bag in a Deck of Cards.” Oh, sure, I thought. Everyone claims to be geekiest — and I suppose technically this claim could be true because, hey, how many “dice bags in a deck of cards” are there, anyway? But I clicked over and looked at the project, and I’m pretty convinced. This is definitely one of the geekiest decks of cards I’ve seen.
I’ll admit: I like cards. I started collecting poker decks a long time ago, well before I became a board game fanatic. I just liked seeing cards with different backs, with creative faces, with odd shapes or sizes. At some point I realized I wasn’t generally using the cards for anything and my collecting slowed down, but I still have a soft spot for them. Lately, though, I’ve felt that there are simply too many “deck of cards” projects on Kickstarter, and after backing a few I’ve tried to ignore the rest. I have enough cards. Really.
But Dicecards are different. They’re designed to be a “dice bag” — they’re randomizers, but unlike, say, the deck of cards that has two six-sided dice on each card, these have oodles of different combinations. The six-sided die is there, of course, but so are the d4, d8, d10, d12, and d20. There’s a coin for coin flips, a compass for direction, letter tiles, a dreidel, and even straws in case you need to pick a short straw. There are well over 30 elements on the cards, and even the way that they’re placed and distributed (using computer modeling) is extremely geeky.
With this deck of cards, any time you need to choose a random whatever, you just flip a card. Not every item is on every single card (in order to make the distributions right) so if it’s not present, then you flip cards until you get one. Okay, it’s probably not as fun as actually rolling dice, which is one of the great pleasures in life, but it’s certainly a much more compact way to carry a whole bunch of different types of dice in a single package. (Another one, of course, is the extremely successful Dice Rings project, particularly the d24.)
Even though this project is one from the UK, which can now create Kickstarter projects, I backed it for a deck because it just seems like a really fun idea. At higher levels you can get things like uncut sheets of the cards, large prints, or even completely custom decks of cards. Visit the Kickstarter page, or go to Dicecards.com for more info. There are about three weeks left on the project.
