Inside the Deck: Digging Deep on Suits, Numbers, and Design

On the show, Jake, you've played Air, Land, and Sea, correct?

Correct.

Okay, Paul, you've played Air, Land, and Sea.

Quite a lot, yeah.

Yes, and I've played Air, Land, and Sea.

Amazing.

So Air, Land, and Sea is an 18-card game that is a lane battler where there's an air, land, and sea lane, more or less, and there's three suits, values one through six, and these cards have different special powers on them that allow you to m- s- essentially manipulate what cards have been played to certain lanes so that there's a lot of uncertainty about the, what the ultimate value of a given lane will be.

This is a game that you're trying to win two of three lanes, and you're trying to, you sort of play this iteratively.

You play, you play a hand until maybe someone wins or maybe someone retreats, 'cause they can see that they're going to lose, and they want to give their opponent fewer points for gaining a victory by seeing earlier that they're on the losing side of the table.

So there's lots of speculation.

These powers do things like potentially change the value of certain cards, potentially move cards from one row to another.

Potentially they're more powerful in certain rows.

And you can also play any of these cards face down.

So all of the cards in this game, 18-card game, are modal because they all have whatever is printed on them in terms of the value and the special power they have, but they could all be played as a two-point card in any single lane.

So to my mind, Air, Land, and Sea does this for a few reasons.

One is that this small deck really equips the players and empowers the players to play in that speculative space, right? There's not so many cards that you can't track what's happening, so it makes it more interesting that the game itself is about understanding when you have a winning hand and when you have a losing hand and trying to determine that as early as possible.

I have an idea.

As we are testing out this new episode idea in real time, I think we should start each of these games we're gonna talk about by giving the stats of the deck l- set up up top so people kind of have that in mind as we get into the rules explanation.

So in this game, just to reiterate, we're talking about a deck of 18 cards of three suits, one to six.

That's right.

I, first off, I, as you said that, I didn't really realize, like, this is a micro game.

This is an 18-card deck game.

I didn't realize it either.

Which it does not feel like that.

It doesn't come in a wallet.