Custom Double Pinochle Deck concept

[RandCo]

I am working on a custom 112 card deck of cards which would primarily be useful for playing a new variation of Double Deck Pinochle, but can also be used to play interesting variations of other card games.  It would be Bicycle branded with the card faces having a variation of the standard Bicycle card faces.  The card backs would be custom.

The main purpose of the deck is to add a new level of strategy to card games by adding 4 Color Suits to the standard 4 standard suits.  When playing Pinochle with this deck the 4 Color Suits can be used to make melds as well as the standard suits, for example a Run of a Blue Jack, a Blue Queen, and a Blue King.  When playing tricks in Pinochle, the Color Suit of a card can be followed as well as the standard suit.  This applies to other meld forming games like Rummy, and trick-taking games like Bridge.

The deck would consist of 4 stripped decks with the Ranks of 9, 10, Jack, Queen, King, and Ace in the 4 standard suits (a Euchre deck of 24 cards), each in a different color.  In other words a Blue, Red, Green, and Purple Euchre deck, all with the same backs.  There would also be 4 Jokers, 1 in each color.  The set would use 2 uncut sheets for printing.

The deck would include Game Rules cards or a booklet with rules for playing Double Deck Pinochle, Pinochle, Euchre, Poker, and other games using the custom set.  There would also be a website with rules for variations of most popular card games.

The cards would have metallic gold ink on the front and back and possibly foil and embossing on the tuck box.  The artwork would be of a quality consistent with professionally designed decks.  The Tuck Box would be twice the thickness of a standard deck.  The Kickstarter Reward and retail price would be around $15.

I have seen other posts here where decks with more than the 4 standard suits are considered kind of amateur, but the extra suits in this deck have a purpose.

My question here would be, would the fact that it is not a standard deck of 52 cards plus jokers, and thicker than a standard deck, make it undesirable to custom card collectors or would it just be an interesting new type of custom deck?

[Don Boyer]

I am working on a custom 112 card deck of cards which would primarily be useful for playing a new variation of Double Deck Pinochle, but can also be used to play interesting variations of other card games.  It would be Bicycle branded with the card faces having a variation of the standard Bicycle card faces.  The card backs would be custom.

The main purpose of the deck is to add a new level of strategy to card games by adding 4 Color Suits to the standard 4 standard suits.  When playing Pinochle with this deck the 4 Color Suits can be used to make melds as well as the standard suits, for example a Run of a Blue Jack, a Blue Queen, and a Blue King.  When playing tricks in Pinochle, the Color Suit of a card can be followed as well as the standard suit.  This applies to other meld forming games like Rummy, and trick-taking games like Bridge.

The deck would consist of 4 stripped decks with the Ranks of 9, 10, Jack, Queen, King, and Ace in the 4 standard suits (a Euchre deck of 24 cards), each in a different color.  In other words a Blue, Red, Green, and Purple Euchre deck, all with the same backs.  There would also be 4 Jokers, 1 in each color.  The set would use 2 uncut sheets for printing.

The deck would include Game Rules cards or a booklet with rules for playing Double Deck Pinochle, Pinochle, Euchre, Poker, and other games using the custom set.  There would also be a website with rules for variations of most popular card games.

The cards would have metallic gold ink on the front and back and possibly foil and embossing on the tuck box.  The artwork would be of a quality consistent with professionally designed decks.  The Tuck Box would be twice the thickness of a standard deck.  The Kickstarter Reward and retail price would be around $15.

I have seen other posts here where decks with more than the 4 standard suits are considered kind of amateur, but the extra suits in this deck have a purpose.

My question here would be, would the fact that it is not a standard deck of 52 cards plus jokers, and thicker than a standard deck, make it undesirable to custom card collectors or would it just be an interesting new type of custom deck?

Well, RandCo, it sounds like a very ambitious project!

First of all, regarding collectors...  I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, but no, most collectors wouldn't be interested.  Most collectors really only go for International Standard decks in Poker size.  A smaller number go for Bridge decks as well, and a smaller number still go for standard pinochle decks.

However, that shouldn't bother you in the least - collectors AREN'T your target market!  You're after a market of people who actually PLAY with their cards, far more so than those who simply collect them.  When you're talking about that market, you're talking about an entirely different animal.

First of all, though, is that you need to insure the PLAYABILITY and ACCURACY of your concept.  For example - you've described the deck as having 112 cards.  But your more detailed description gives us only 100 cards!  Maybe I'm missing something in the description?  If I'm understanding you correctly, there's six ranks, each in four suits, and each suit comes in four colors, plus a joker in each of the four colors.  By my math, that's (6 ranks x 4 suits + 1 joker) x 4 colors, giving only 100 cards.

Now about the playability... Have you actually TESTED this concept - and not just with you and a few other people, but with lots and lots of people, as many as you can wrangle?  Have you seen how the game dynamics change with the introduction of this third dimension of each suit coming in four different colors?  Some people really underestimate the radical changes that can occur when you make simple changes to a basic card deck and try playing old games with it.  For example, we had a gentleman that frequented this forum who created a deck with three additional court ranks, making the total ranks sixteen.  He was considering it for a new gambling game he wanted to introduce to casinos.  I tried playing Canfield solitaire with a sample of his deck that he had printed - never won a single game!  The additional complexity of the deck made the odds of winning significantly longer.  I advised him that the odds of a casino taking him up on his game would be a distant longshot as well - the added ranks might make the odds stronger in the casinos favor, but it would have next to no appeal to players for that very same reason.  Additionally, gamblers do tend to be a traditional lot for the most part and likely wouldn't take well to a deck of cards which was that much different than the one they'd been playing with their entire lives.

You really want to make sure that your deck doesn't make traditional games utterly unplayable - or if it does, that you can make rules modifications that will offset the complexity to bring the odds down to Earth again.  Alternately, you can create this custom deck and simply make custom games to play using it - but again, you want to make the games simple enough that people won't be spending most of their time trying to learn it by scratching their heads saying, "What was this guy thinking?"

I recommend that you try something similar to what the other guy did - go ahead and make a demo version of your deck.  Use bog standard faces but introduce your new colors.  Go to a printer that will do VERY short print runs - MakePlayingCards.com will print you as few as a single deck, though you will be paying top dollar per-deck costs for print runs that short.  Make perhaps a dozen or two decks out of pocket and get some people you know to play with them - preferably inveterate card players who are practically addicted to the idea of playing cards and eager for something new and different.  The kind of people who try alternative card games and go to gaming conventions would be right up your alley.  Provide them with your game rules, let them go at it and play a while, then ask them for feedback about what they thought worked about your deck and your games and what needed some retooling.

Using the cheapest available options, you'd be making your 100-card decks on bridge-sized cards (poker sized might be too large for a deck with this many cards in it) on promotional stock (270 gsm bluecore pasteboard, either textured/matte or glossy/smooth) in full color with shrink wrapping and no box or booklet included.  If you made as many as 30 decks minimum, your per-deck cost would be $14.05, for a total sample run of $421.50 - not bad, really, when you consider that such a print run might have been considered practically impossible as recently as 15 years ago; you would have needed to either make a lot more decks or pay a lot more per deck, resulting in a significantly, prohibitively higher overall cost.  Something along these lines is, for many people, not cheap but still within the realm of possible, price-wise.  You'd probably spend at least this much on a very cheap vacation weekend for two somewhere within driving distance!  You could make fewer decks, but you'd be looking at much higher per-deck costs, at least $18.90 each and (for the shortest print runs of five or fewer decks) as much as $21.20 per deck.  If you're making anything between 23 and 29 decks, the big difference in per-deck cost actually makes it cheaper to make 30; otherwise, making 22 or less becomes more affordable.  The pricing also remains the same if you make the decks as large as 108 cards, so you could add a few extra if you wanted to for the purposes of experimenting, or, alternately, they could be used for printing your game rules or other information about how to use your unique deck.

BTW: as nice as it would be to have Bicycle branding, I wouldn't worry about it so much in this case.  Collectors care about Bicycle branding - game players into unique, non-standard decks are a lot less concerned about it and using the Bicycle brand name (as well as printing with USPC) would significantly drive up your production costs.  You could make a decent-quality deck with a company like MPC, get the per-deck costs under control and still have a small-enough print run that you wouldn't need to sell a thousand decks in order to make a successful project and perhaps earn a few bucks along the way.  Go to their web site, play with the numbers and see what you can come up with.  If you managed to blow it out of the water and get enough backers to sell thousands and thousands of decks, then you could look into upgrading the print run by going with a major company like USPC, Cartamundi, Expert PCC, Legends PCC, etc.  But before you even get to the project pricing-and-planning stages, make sure you've got a viable concept by field-testing it using a short print run from MPC, paid for out-of-pocket, and getting people to try your decks/games to see if and how well they work.

BTW: if you really can't afford to print even a small run with MPC, you can buy BLANK game cards from companies like US Games Systems.  They sell a box of 500 bridge-sized cards, blank on both sides, for $15 - you can grab some markers, make simplified, hand-drawn faces for your decks and they'd be enough for field-testing your concept.  Assuming my count of 100 cards per deck is right, you'd be spending $3, some time and some magic marker inks in four colors to make your decks in groups of five!  Alternately, they have cards with blank faces and pre-printed, plaid backs, but they're more meant for tarot decks - they're sold in tarot size (2.75" wide, 4.75" tall) and a pack of 80 is $9.95.

[RandCo]

Thank you for the detailed response Don.

I didn’t go into much detail in my description, I was mainly interested in the question of whether collectors would be interested in a non-standard deck, which you answered.

You are right that the target for this deck would be people who play Pinochle and other card games other than Poker.  This is a niche market, and card game players who would be interested in a custom specialty deck that costs more than standard decks would be an even more niche market.  Plus there is a very limited way to promote to them, the posts on Pinochle and other card game forums are few and far apart.

I was thinking there might be some crossover of the player and collector market, but I discovered after posting here, the scarcity of forums and blogs for non-poker card games.  I’m not sure, but I think people who seriously play games like Pinochle, Bridge, Spades, and other games like that, play online against other players more than in-person games.

So, it looks like there is not much of a market for this type of a card deck.

Anyway, just for curiosity I will go into more detail about the concept of this deck.  I have enclosed a graphic showing the card faces.

First, I forgot to mention that there are 12 ‘extra’ cards in the set.  These would be used for special game rules cards for some popular games.

The concept behind this deck is to add an extra level of strategy to popular card games by adding more options when playing.  This is done by adding ‘Color Suits’ in addition to the standard suits.

For example, when playing Rummy type games, a Run meld can be made using Color Suits as well as the standard suits.  For example, a Run meld of a Blue 9, a Blue 10, and a Blue Jack can be formed.

In trick-taking games, players can follow the Color Suit as well as the normal standard suit.  For example, if the last card played was a Green Jack of Clubs, a Green Queen of Diamonds could be played and would win the trick over that card.   

Because there are 4 Color Suits, the odds of drawing a card with a certain Color Suit are the same as drawing a card with a certain standard suit.

Poker can be played using this deck with variations of the Poker Hand Rankings.  I won’t go into all of the specifics but the main difference would be players would be able to more easily form an “of a kind” hand and it would be harder to form Flush based hands.  The Poker Rank Order would change according to the probabilities.  This would effect strategy when exchanging cards and make it more interesting, but the real strategy in Poker is in the “betting” more than card selection.  The average winning hand would change with this deck, but once players learned the difference, the game would basically be the same although bluffing would be easier.

I have tested the games, mostly Poker, and used that to develop the rules, but not extensively with a lot of players.  I do have fairly well developed rules for a lot of games and I will them use them on another deck I am designing which is similar in concept to this one.

Thank you again for your advice.

[Don Boyer]

Thank you for the detailed response Don.

I didn’t go into much detail in my description, I was mainly interested in the question of whether collectors would be interested in a non-standard deck, which you answered.

You are right that the target for this deck would be people who play Pinochle and other card games other than Poker.  This is a niche market, and card game players who would be interested in a custom specialty deck that costs more than standard decks would be an even more niche market.  Plus there is a very limited way to promote to them, the posts on Pinochle and other card game forums are few and far apart.

I was thinking there might be some crossover of the player and collector market, but I discovered after posting here, the scarcity of forums and blogs for non-poker card games.  I’m not sure, but I think people who seriously play games like Pinochle, Bridge, Spades, and other games like that, play online against other players more than in-person games.

So, it looks like there is not much of a market for this type of a card deck.

Anyway, just for curiosity I will go into more detail about the concept of this deck.  I have enclosed a graphic showing the card faces.

First, I forgot to mention that there are 12 ‘extra’ cards in the set.  These would be used for special game rules cards for some popular games.

The concept behind this deck is to add an extra level of strategy to popular card games by adding more options when playing.  This is done by adding ‘Color Suits’ in addition to the standard suits.

For example, when playing Rummy type games, a Run meld can be made using Color Suits as well as the standard suits.  For example, a Run meld of a Blue 9, a Blue 10, and a Blue Jack can be formed.

In trick-taking games, players can follow the Color Suit as well as the normal standard suit.  For example, if the last card played was a Green Jack of Clubs, a Green Queen of Diamonds could be played and would win the trick over that card.   

Because there are 4 Color Suits, the odds of drawing a card with a certain Color Suit are the same as drawing a card with a certain standard suit.

Poker can be played using this deck with variations of the Poker Hand Rankings.  I won’t go into all of the specifics but the main difference would be players would be able to more easily form an “of a kind” hand and it would be harder to form Flush based hands.  The Poker Rank Order would change according to the probabilities.  This would effect strategy when exchanging cards and make it more interesting, but the real strategy in Poker is in the “betting” more than card selection.  The average winning hand would change with this deck, but once players learned the difference, the game would basically be the same although bluffing would be easier.

I have tested the games, mostly Poker, and used that to develop the rules, but not extensively with a lot of players.  I do have fairly well developed rules for a lot of games and I will them use them on another deck I am designing which is similar in concept to this one.

Thank you again for your advice.

Here's my thoughts on this.

Take your deck to Kickstarter.  There's a good chance you'd find your audience there if you can make the deck affordably, which you can, if you take some of the advice I gave you about getting it printed.

Don't use the term "color suits."  It's a bit confusing and the last thing you want with a complex product like yours is to create consumer confusion.  You explain trick taking, etc. by referring to the cards as working either by RANK, SUIT or COLOR.  Make it clear that these are three distinct characteristics that identify each card.  Suits refer only to the shape of the pips that appear on the card, while colors refer only to the color of those pips, regardless of what suit they are.

It certainly does raise the complexity level of games when you work it like this - you're taking a deck of cards, which worked in two dimensions (suits and ranks) and adding a third dimension (colors).  Colors have always existed on playing cards, but as each pip only came in one color and there were only two colors overall, it was less of a factor and really just a subset of suits, whereas you're breaking it out into a dimension/characteristic all its own, independent of the suit.  It's a good thing that you're restricting yourself to just the upper range of ranks used in games like pinochle - the level of complexity as well as the number of cards per deck would go much, much higher if you covered the entire standard rank set.

There's really just one caveat I can think of.  Dyed-in-the-wool card players will be resistant, naturally.  But you'll probably get some pushback from older players as well.  For people with poor vision who have more trouble identifying cards by suit/pip shape, there are "no revoke" decks on the market, which essentially assign a single, unique color to each suit.  A typical arrangement might be red hearts, black spades, green clubs and yellow diamonds.  Many "low-vision" decks with oversized indices also use a four-color arrangement, making each suit its own color as well.  While this makes such a deck terrible for solitaire, it makes it harder for a bridge player to screw up in their bids and such by mistaking one red suit for the other or one black suit for the other.  That market segment (which I'll grant you isn't huge) will be less than thrilled about trying to work with a deck where spades can come in four different colors, and all the other suits also come in those same four colors - color will no longer be usable by them as a way of identifying suits.

It's a minor consideration, really - you're truly going for a different and more specialized market.  It's a market that, for the right game, they're willing to pay a few extra bucks, and if you can find the right sweet spot in terms of production cost per deck and number of decks you need to sell to hit that production cost - as well as the right price at which to offer it to the public once you've factored in your profit - you could have a modest success on your hands, enough for certain to be able to get this deck made not just for your own use but also for a handful of game players willing to try something different.  When you go to make your crowdfunding project, just remember to factor in EVERYTHING, down to the last cardboard box and postage stamp, so as to make sure your personal costs are covered and then some.

[RandCo]

Thanks again Don for the advice.  I am working on another deck design that uses the same color suit concept.  I understand your advice about not using the "Color Suit" term and using just Color.  This works for describing the cards in game rules and in general.  When describing an individual card such as the 'Red Queen of Hearts', the obvious way of describing the card is by color/rank/suit.  The problem I am having is describing the color function on the tuck case or in an introductory statement.  Just saying the cards come in 4 colors implies a 'no revoke' deck where all of the suits have the same color.  In terms of game play the colors in the deck above, and the other deck I am working on, work exactly the same as the standard suits.  They are used to make flush based hands in poker, to make melds in Rummy, to follow suit in trick-taking games, etc.  Another way to describe the colors would be as a 'game mechanic' or a 'design element', but these are terms nobody but a game designer would commonly use.

Do you, or any other viewers, have any suggestions for describing the colors other than Color Suits?

[selfthinker]

Another group which would be seriously disadvantaged by having colour as a third dimension are people who are colour blind.
About 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women are colour blind, that makes about 4.5% of the entire world population.
If you make one game mechanic identifiable by only colour and nothing else, that can make games that rely on that mechanic completely unplayable to those people as they won't be able to tell one specific colour from one other.

There are two things you can do to help with that:
1. Test your colours through colour blindness simulation filters to see how they look like to people with various kinds of colour deficiencies. You could tweak them so the lack of difference between them is not that bad. I'm not sure if finding good colours that work is possible, though.
2. Or, the better option, don't distinguish the colours by colour alone and add something else to the cards to help recognising the colours. For example, you can add the single letter B to the blue suits, G to the green suits, etc. Or write the colour name out on the side of the card, or to make it less obvious that it's specifically for colour blind people, you could spell out the whole name of the card, like "red queen of clubs". Another idea is to add differently shaped containers around the indices, like a rectangle for blue and a circle for red, etc. Or give suits some differently shaped pattern inside, like in heraldry. The main point is, there should be something more than just colour to identify that third dimension.

[selfthinker]

Here are some screenshot which demonstrate how close and nearly indistinguishable some of the colours are to some people.
Keep in mind, it gets harder to distinguish them on their own when you hold them in your hands and cannot compare them to the other colours.

[RandCo]

Thanks for the input selfthinker.  I had no idea that many people had some form of color blindness.  I am also working on a special deck of playing cards very similar to this one which uses the color suits.  I will introduce a subtle element into the design to help someone who is color blind identify the colors.  Most of the colors are still identifiable in the tests you included, but the monochromatic is a real problem.  I intentionally made the colors about the same luminance, not realizing this could be a problem.

[Don Boyer]

Thanks again Don for the advice.  I am working on another deck design that uses the same color suit concept.  I understand your advice about not using the "Color Suit" term and using just Color.  This works for describing the cards in game rules and in general.  When describing an individual card such as the 'Red Queen of Hearts', the obvious way of describing the card is by color/rank/suit.  The problem I am having is describing the color function on the tuck case or in an introductory statement.  Just saying the cards come in 4 colors implies a 'no revoke' deck where all of the suits have the same color.  In terms of game play the colors in the deck above, and the other deck I am working on, work exactly the same as the standard suits.  They are used to make flush based hands in poker, to make melds in Rummy, to follow suit in trick-taking games, etc.  Another way to describe the colors would be as a 'game mechanic' or a 'design element', but these are terms nobody but a game designer would commonly use.

Do you, or any other viewers, have any suggestions for describing the colors other than Color Suits?

Don't call them color suits, period.  Just colors.  Suits and colors are independent of each other in your deck.  You can describe the deck as being "three-dimensional" in that there are three identifiers to each card, all three of which are needed to identify a specific card.

As far as overcoming the color-blindness issue, you could add a word to identify the color.  If that seems a bit too on-the-nose, you could add additional symbology - for example, introduce a vertical line alongside the index and add breaks to the line to indicate what color the card is.  For instance, a solid line without breaks might be black, while a single break in the middle would be red, two breaks would be blue, three breaks would be green, etc.  It takes color-blindness completely out of the equation.

If you don't like using a line, you can create a shape to surround the index - for example, place it in a rectangle for one color, in a pentagon for another color, in a circle for the third color and in a hexagon for the fourth.  Triangles are more common, but they'd be tougher to fit the index into easily - you could try, using them instead of hexagons, as hexagons might get confused with circles if one doesn't pay close attention.

[RandCo]

Thanks Don.  I actually did almost exactly what you suggested about the names and design on the new set I'm working on.  Before reading this I decided to use Suits and 'Colors', and to use the 'Color Suits' term for the 16 Suit and Color combinations such as Red Hearts or Blue Spades.  I also added a border element, with 4 positions, to the design I'm working on which indicate the color of the card. 

The similarity to your comments gives me confidence that these were good choices.

[Don Boyer]

Thanks Don.  I actually did almost exactly what you suggested about the names and design on the new set I'm working on.  Before reading this I decided to use Suits and 'Colors', and to use the 'Color Suits' term for the 16 Suit and Color combinations such as Red Hearts or Blue Spades.  I also added a border element, with 4 positions, to the design I'm working on which indicate the color of the card. 

The similarity to your comments gives me confidence that these were good choices.

Be careful about using border elements to indicate anything about a card.  It's those things on the card's edge that are most likely to be accidentally (or intentionally!) peeked at by a fellow player, so the less there is to reveal, the better.  It also makes it more difficult to read the card, depending on placement - the more of the card you have to look at to know the information about it, the less convenient it is for you as a player.  It's why the index was created in the first place!  They were originally patented as "Squeezers" because they allowed you to hold a hand of cards "squeezed" together, exposing just the corner of each card, allowing you to know every card in your hand - before that, you had to physically move the cards around and glimpse the full face of them just to know what you were holding, and Heaven help you if you had poor memory!

If you can find a way to fit it into the index instead, all the better.  If you preferred keeping it simple and not needing a system that had to be memorized for the colors, simply put the name of the color there.  I've seen specialized card games in the past where, in order to eliminate any confusion between the values of 6 and 9, the word "SIX" was used instead of the numeral on the cards.  You would simply place the name of the color in small print (but not too small) somewhere as part of the index, perhaps vertically to the right alongside the value and suit.  It works if you choose colors with short names - blue, red, green, black.  To go a step further in the interests of keeping the index small, they could be given three-letter abbreviations, BLU, RED, GRN, BLK.  To the non-color-blind, it would simply serve as a reminder that color factors in as a separate and independent value, in addition to suit and value - to the color-blind, it's a valuable cue to what color a card is and with it sitting right in the index, it doesn't require holding the cards all that much differently than you would an ordinary hand of standard cards.