Welcome to Paradise
Introducing the Paradise Deck, beautiful new art for the Island Deck.
The Island Deck
The Roja Deck, or Roya Deck, was introduced to Port Ramon, Traza Ligera, in 1738 by Remolander explorer Roya Ruiz García Alarcón, better known as The Red Barber. It is also called the Red Deck and the Island Deck.
2022 Alt Back
This card back was designed in 2022 for the gift shop at Delano Beach. This is the back design, and the faces are the same as shown below.
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 three different versions of this deck from Drive Thru Cards, or you may 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)
The Island Deck 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, a family card game for 3-6 players
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 (v 1.0, 2/9/20) a bluffing game for 3 to 6 players
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 manage to play the last card in the final round.
Rules for Down the Well (v1.2, 11/1/23) a simple card game for 2-6 players
More Games to Come: 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 and other decks in the same family. You can read about James Ernest’s philosophy of design with original “traditional” decks in the “Designing Traditional Card Decks” article 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.
The Blossom Deck: This is a new deck that’s mostly the same as the Island Deck, but with the added feature that the six suits can be split into Day and Night. You can use an Island Deck to play these games, treating Queens as value 8 and Kings as value 9, and for the game Cowards, grouping the warm suits (Red, Pink, Yellow) into “day” and the cool suits (Blue, Green, Purple) into “night.”
The Blossom Deck Games:
Bulldog: This is gambling game for 2 to 8 players, created for an unfinished short story set in the Dearworth Valley. Players start with four cards, and will receive five more from the deck. Your goal is to cancel your hand down to the fewest points, while guessing if your opponents can do the same. Or fold early, if you think your cards can’t win!
Rules for Bulldog (V 1.6, 1/9/25), a gambling game for 2-8 players
Cowards: This is a bluffing game for two players, using the “night” and “day” division in the Blossom deck. Each player receives two cards: one from the night deck, and one from the day. Players reveal one card each, and the lower card decides if the game is on. Based on the classic James Ernest freebie Barcelona, a standard deck game avaiable at the Ready Room.
Rules for Cowards (V 1.0, 11/5/24), a gambling game for 2 players
History of the Decks, 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. 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 game designer in post-war California.
The latest (and truest) backstory 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.
Meanwhile, the Blossom Deck is a slightly different six-suited deck from the Dew Point universe, designed for games including Bulldog and Cowards. We keep the two decks on the same page because they are almost the same, and you can play games from one deck with the other (in a pinch). Bulldog is a poker-like press-your-luck game from the Dearworth Valley, while Cowards is a two-player bluffing game, popular across the Annet Sky.
Whatever its fabricated backstory, this deck is lovely, and the list of games is small, but growing!
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