The Everdeck

About this board game

The Everdeck is a 120-card game system for 1–10 players, designed to adapt to traditional and modern games. It functions as a portable travel companion, a universal proxy deck, and a tool for game design and prototyping.

Rather than simply adding extra ranks and suits to a standard deck, The Everdeck uses its cards to represent many distinct game systems. Its combinations of ranks and suits can map to familiar card formats as well as more specialized designs.

• Two standard decks
• Tarot and Hanafuda
• Modern games using different combinations of ranks and suits
• Sequential decks
• Word games and social games

The system is built around combinatorial efficiency. Beneath its minimalist pen-and-ink appearance are mathematical and linguistic patterns intended to make the deck both practical and visually distinctive.

That combination of flexibility and compactness makes The Everdeck useful in several ways. It can serve as a portable collection of game systems, provide cards for games that require a different deck, or help designers explore ideas during the prototyping process.

The deck’s symbols and systems are explained through the designer’s homepage and design document, while an accompanying geeklist presents games that can be mapped to the system. Released in 2019, The Everdeck offers a single, carefully structured deck for exploring a wide range of card-game possibilities.