Wednesday, June 10, 2009

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.

Arkham Horror Space Woes

The New "Innsmouth Horror" expansion set has finally been distributed.

Like each of the <Blahblah>Horror expansions for this game, it is packaged in a box of about the same dimensions as the original game, and contains several additional cards for the existing decks as well as a fan of entirely new decks of cards to add to the game along with a board expansion of around 1/3rd the size of the base game board.

Put four people round a table to play this game and the problem becomes one of finding enough space for the player cards, status display sheets, various tokens that indicate money, sanity and health and I don't know what-all else, The card display for the big monster, the board, the extra board and the two dozen card decks now required to play the blasted game.

I've said elsewhere that FFG could have gone the "Formula One" route with the player displays and made them gust-of-air proof either using dials or pegs to keep track of the various customizable settings each character has. That would, of course, have driven up the cost but would also have made for one component that could be stood upright to save space. Ditto the main monster display.

But the board aside, the biggest consumers of table real estate are the card decks.

The cards vary in size. Some are the size of Pinochle cards, some about half that.

If only some way could be found to stack them in such a way that they use less space while still being easy to reach and draw cards from.

I'm working on this, but the old brain is not co-operating (as usual). I'm thinking that some sort of stand in which decks of cards can be stood on end at an angle would work. I originally thought of a slotted wooden stand, but the slots would have to be very wide to accomodate some of the decks, and there are no two decks of the same thickness, leading to more wasted space. Not only that, these bolt-on expansions always add a few inches to the overall deck thickness. Whatever it ends up looking like, the stand must be able to cater for this factor.

It's a puzzler and no mistake.