Two Better Decks of Cards

While on vacation in Monterey, my brother-in-law, P.D., introduced me to one of his inventions. He has created a better deck of cards, which he named the Decktet.

The history of the invention was the he was playing a role-playing game with friends and decided to put the characters in the story and other plot elements on a deck of cards. The factions involved naturally introduced the concept of most card having two suits. He limited the deck to 36 cards because that was enough for playing fun card games and he wanted all the deck to have real narrative consistency (a card with suits X and Y has a picture of something from the story involving X and Y).

With his permission, I'm experimenting with a larger version (for now named the Deck60) that has 60 cards. With this larger version five-person games work nicely. The cost is abandoning the narrative consistency; my cards don't have words or pictures in the middle.

I'm especially excited about these decks because we came up with a nice game like dominoes but with more to it. I used to live in New Orleans, and know how fun dominoes can be. But normally dominoes is lacking in depth: our game, Biscuit, has just enough.

I'll make the Deck60 available when I'm sure it works well, and worth having besides the Decktet.

UPDATE: I had erroneously estimated that the probability of straights was closer to what card players expect with the Deck60, but the Decktet is actually better in that way. (P.D. did the math I was too lazy to do.) This probably is the "straw that breaks the camel's back" and makes the Deck60 not worth further investigation. Sorry to anyone with a family of five.