The Skeleton Deck

The Skeleton Deck v1

The Skeleton Deck is a bare-bones version of the overwrought custom deck I used to use in my pocket-sized Emergency Games Kit. After a few people had asked about it, I thought I'd give it a name and some colourblind-friendly suit symbols, and put it up online.

Depending on which aspects you ignore, it's simultaneously:

• A regular 52-card poker deck with two jokers (the white skeleton and the black key)
• The numbers 1-6 in eight coloured suits (red Stops, orange Bricks, yellow Coins, green Leaves, blue Drops, purple Shields, white Skulls and black Keys) and six asterisk wildcards (red, yellow, green, blue, white, black)
• The numbers 1 through 52

As well as anything you can play with a poker deck, decent games I know that work with the Skeleton suits are:-

• Bunte Runde (1-6 in six suits, a pawn, 36 poker chips)
• Coup (1-3 in five suits, some poker chips)
• Dead Drop (0-5 across various suits, wildcards as zero)
• En Garde (1-5 in five suits, movement track, two pawns)
• Good Little Tricks (numbers 1-6 in six suits, one wild as a 7)
• Heimlich & Co (numbers 1-10, jokers, pawns, dice)
• Hey, That's My Fish! (slightly cut down to 54 cards in a brick pattern, pawns)
• Khmer (1-5 in two suits, 6 in six)
• Kobayakawa (numbers 1-15, poker chips)
• Llama (1-6 in eight suits, wildcards as llamas, poker chips)
• Loco (0-5 in six suits, wildcards as zero, poker chips in matching colours)
• Lucky Numbers (2 player, numbers 1-40)
• No Thanks (numbers 3-35, poker chips)
• Pico 2 (numbers 4-16)
• Prey Another Day (1-5 in five suits)
• Skull & Roses (some Skulls, any other cards - although this isn't quite equivalent)

You can order the deck relatively cheaply as an Artscow half-size deck or full-size deck, or do what you like with the pokerless card artwork under a CC-Attribution-NonCommercial licence. (The boring card back design is to stop slight printing offsets from affecting gameplay in secret information games, as Artscow isn't very precise about this. I ordered a few test decks and they seemed fine, apart from the blue suit showing up the offset printing by overlapping the border unevenly.)