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The Island Deck is a six-suited deck of 54 cards, designed for original games like Showboat, Powderkeg, and Down the Well.

You can buy this deck on high-quality playing cards in a handsome tuck box from Drive Thru Cards, or download your own print-and-play files below:

• Island Deck at Drive Thru Cards (Flower Back)

• Island Deck at Drive Thru Cards (Delano Beach)

• Paradise Island Deck at DriveThruCards (Paradise Deck)

• Print-and-Play Island Deck

The Games:

Showboat: This is a family card game for 3 to 6 players, with alternate rules for two. It’s a simple but unusual game about carefully planned card play, and was designed in tandem with the Island Deck.

• Rules for Showboat

• Video: How to Play Showboat

Powderkeg: This is a unique bluffing / gambling game in which the dealer squares off against all the other players, in a contest of wits revolving around the content of just one hand!

• Rules for Powderkeg

Down the Well: This is a simple hand-emptying game with a twist - you need to guess how many rounds the game will last, and then play the last card in the final round.

• Rules for Down the Well

• Video: How to Play Down the Well

More Games: In the spirit of other popular decks, such as Pairs and the Poker deck, we plan to create many new games for the Island Deck. You can read a little about James Ernest’s philosophy of design with original “traditional” decks in “Designing Traditional Card Decks” at The Lecture Hall.

Printing Your Own: For notes on how to print your own copy of this deck from the Print-and-Play PDF above, check out James Ernest’s 2014 How To Make Cards video.

Play Online! The Island Deck is now available in Tabletop Simulator. It’s just a big empty table with the Island Deck sitting in the middle, but for Showboat and Down the Well, that’s all you need! To play Powderkeg, just add some poker chips from the game components menu.

• Island Deck on Tabletop Simulator

History of the Deck, True and False

The Island Deck is a six-suited deck created by James Ernest for Crab Fragment Labs, and has been in development since 2016. Showboat was originally a card game about trying to sneak out of a restaurant without paying the bill, which used a custom deck of food and story cards that eventually became the Island Deck. For a time after that it was called The Farmer’s Game, and featured in an alternate timeline that involved the Dust Bowl, a community of displaced farm robots, and an Italian farmer / game designer in post-war California.

The latest back story describes the Island Deck as a fundamental part of Crab Fragment history. This deck was first brought to Port Ramón, Tiempo Libre, in 1518 by the explorer Roya Alarcón. It’s sometimes called the Roya deck or Roja deck. The oldest known game is a gambling game called Powderkeg. Meanwhile, Showboat, previously known as The Farmer’s Game, is based on a traditional Elatian card game called Quattro Punti, or Quattro Ponti.

Whatever its fabricated backstory, this deck is lovely, and the list of games is small, but growing!