Friday, November 23, 2012

Kickstarter Project Update: Póstumo - The Deck of the Dead 

Project Update #17: The Jacks


We wanted to share with you some of our insanity we had in adding the details for the Jacks in Póstumo.

We opted to base our deck off the traditional English deck, which became really huge when Edmond Hoyle also chose to keep these traditions (fun fact: Hoyle is best known for writing the rules to card games. He's in the Poker Hall of Fame, despite having died over 50 years before Poker was invented). 

The most popular concept is the one-eyed Jacks, and our Jack of Spades and Jack of Hearts are both of the one-eyed variety. 

Another tradition we kept is the weaponry - the axe, the lance, the pike and the "mace" are all represented (we say "mace," because seriously, what the heck is that thing in the Jack of Spades' hand?).

But even subtler than that, we kept the facial hair. Every Jack except the Jack of Clubs has a mustache, while none of the Jacks have beards. So our Jack of Clubs is the only one not participating in Movember.

From there, O took it a step further. There's a lot of nicknames for the cards and who they represent, but we found that most of those nicknames actually come out of the traditional French deck. We have nothing against the French, we're just used to the English deck.

So what is a Jack? Well, when we started designing it, I had always thought of them as being Knights. They got labeled with the "J" instead of the "Kn" so as to not be confused with the Kings. But O was able to find some history suggesting that they are not necessarily knights but knaves, meaning that they're more akin to members of the royal court. They could be knights, or they could just be wealthy and influential people. This made O choose to make all of the Jacks clothing into high-level court garb instead of armor.

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