Wielding the Decks 5: Abstracts

If you have two decks of cards with different backs, you can create triangular, square, or hexagonal game boards of two colors.

A Chess board should be obvious. Pick a king, queen, bishop, etc from each of the decks in two different colors; you'll have to use two different numbers for the pawns. Use the remaining cards to form the board.

Lay the board cards horizontally with space between the cards and place the "pieces" vertically onto them. If both the cards and pieces are oriented vertically, you will have a harder time picking the pieces up without also picking up the game board squares.

If your two decks do not have different backs, just leave out the white squares.

Create a hexagonal board like this:

    XXX XXX XXX
  XXX XXX XXX XXX
XXX XXX XXX XXX XXX
  XXX XXX XXX XXX
    XXX XXX XXX

After laying the hexes, you can play games such as Yinsh or Hex. For Yinsh, for example, each player picks five rings of one color and a pile of stones of a second color (four colors altogether).