Unfeasible Deck Size

Another game I have that suffers from this "Oversize Deck" problem is Munchkin.

I don't mix'n'match Munchkin games. I have the original and the Cthulhu variant, and never the twain shall meet. I do, however, have six expansions added to the basic Munchkin game, making for a Door Deck climbing towards 5 inches tall. This poses two major problems:

Firstly, the largest deck, the Door Deck (Munchkin calls for two decks, the so-called "Door" and "Treasure" decks), threatens to collapse all over the playing area as the players get more animated.

Secondly, the decks are impossible to shuffle in one go. They have to be broken down into four or five smaller packages in order to shuffle them.

Short of investing in a motorized card shuffler (and don't think I haven't thought about it) the shuffling problem is par for the course. But I think I can do something about keeping the decks propped up.

Two Ideas suggest themselves. The first is a simple box in which the cards are dropped in an upright manner so that they sit on one of their short edges and lean back against the back of the box. This has the problem that the deck is thicker than a card is tall, so I'll either have to break the deck in pieces and only stack one piece at a time in a smaller box or put up with the cards slumping into a larger box once enough have been removed during play. Not optimal.

The second idea involves having the cards in a spring-fed shoe, rather like the ones seen in the Sean Connery "Bond" movies. The design could be different. A box open on one of the short sides with a spring-tensioned base and a slotted lid would do the same job.

But then there's the problem of the discard pile. It has to be looked after too since some cards allow players to root though it looking for particular cards.

Back to the drawing board.