Emergency Games Kit

The Emergency Games Kit v4.0, from 2015

I've been carrying a version of this around for a few years now: a collection of game components that's small enough to fit into any bag or pocket, and which unpacks into a decent number of card and dice games. It's inspired by the huge plastic toolboxes of the Seattle Cosmic emergency games kits, which I admired but never really understood the "emergency" aspect of, until I realised that everyone involved presumably had a car.

This kit began in 2013 as dice, plastic poker chips and a half-sized deck of regular playing cards. In 2014, the deck was replaced with a custom-printed one which included added corner numbers (0-5 in six "circle" suits, and numbers 1 through 35, which is enough to play a lot of things) and scanned-in chunks from games I already owned and was playing at the time. It looks a bit baroque, but you quickly tune out the parts of the cards that you don't need for whatever game you're playing.

In 2017 I swapped out the densely formatted deck for a simpler one of just regular poker values, alternate six-of-eight suits in the other corners, and big central numbers of 1-52. I've released that under a CC licence as The Skeleton Deck.

As of September 2022 the full kit stands at 31 interesting games playable with the card deck, dice and/or poker chips, and 86 in the Freeze-Dried Games Pack (a mixed bag of 100-word rulesets for card, dice, paper and word games that I've been compiling on a single sheet of paper), for a total of 117 games.

Version 4.2

Full contents:

• A cheap 5" x 3" Tuff Bag pencil case.
• A one-off 2" x 2.5" (half-sized) mini deck of cards, customised with game art, icons and corner numbers.
• 36 stackable mini poker chips (five each of seven colours and one extra brown one) from Koplow Games.
• Six 12mm dice, the colours matching six of the chips (six being enough to play Farkle; the white die has some red dots to double as a Cinq-O hi/lo die).
• A few sheets of squared paper for pen-and-paper grid games.
• Some scoring sheets for Qwinto.
• A couple of blank crossword grids for Lynx.
• A two-sides-of-A4 PDF printout of the rules for 86 simple paper/card/dice games from the Freeze-Dried Games Pack.
• A slip of rule reminders for the games in the card deck.
• A Zebra Expandz ballpoint pen.
• A bidding reference card for The Bottle Imp.
• One black and one white plastic pawn. (not pictured)
• Two small pre-printed score sheets for Yahtzee.

It all fits inside the pencil case, the chips being bound with two rubber bands in a single stack.

List of games

An emergency game of Santorini

Games in and around the card deck:

• Babylon (poker chips)
• Backgammon (dice, poker chips; "warm" colours vs "cold")
• The Bottle Imp (coloured 1-35 corner values, coin icons, pawn)
• Bunte Runde (circle suits, poker chips, pawn)
• Córdoba (standard deck)
• Coup (icons; Ambassador effect is slightly strengthened from cards being distinguishable)
• Dead Drop (circle suits)
• En Garde (circle suits, pawns)
• Get Bit (standard deck, dice)
• two-player Haggis (scoring stars on standard deck odd/face cards)
• Heimlich & Co (corner values, meeple icons, poker chips, dice)
• slightly cut-down Hey, That's My Fish! (standard deck played in a brick pattern, poker chips)
• Hive (tile images, again played in a brick pattern)
• In a Grove (2-8 corner values, joker, black and white pawns, poker chips)
• Incan Gold (1-17 corner values with some tweaks for duplicates, other cards for hazards and artifacts, poker chips)
• James Rizzi (standard deck)
• Khmer (circle suits)
• Kobayakawa (1-15 corner values, poker chips)
• Llama (circle suits, non-circle cards, poker chips)
• Loco (circle suits, poker chips in matching colours)
• Love Letter (card scans)
• No Thanks (3-35 corner values, poker chips)
• Pecking Order (standard deck, poker chips to mark special cards)
• Pico 2 (4-16 corner values)
• Prey Another Day (circle suits)
• R (corner values and icons)
• Santorini (cards for board, chips, one pawn and die per player; god powers from memory or skipped)
• Skull (skull icons; although with playing cards it isn't quite Skull as the "rose" cards are distinguishable)
• Werewolf (werewolf/seer/­doctor/­vigilante/­hunter/­mayor images on cards)
• Welcome to the Dungeon (card scans, icons)
• Westeros Intrigue (poker cards, chips)

The kit also includes the rules for 86 small games from the Freeze-Dried Games Pack (Yahtzee, Boggle, Lynx, etc), all playable with dice, standard poker cards and/or a pen and paper. And the deck of cards can obviously be used to play any card game that takes a single regular (or stripped) poker deck.