Ryan Hackel wrote:
Why two decktets? Good question. I didn't think the deck was big enough by itself. The basic decktet is 36 cards, with five more special cards in the extended version. Consider that nine cards start out on the board. Then put three cards in each player's hand. Even for a two player game, the setup alone uses 15 of the 36 cards, nearly half. With five players, the initial draw pile would only contain two cards! The decision to restrict the maximum player number or require a second decktet was an easy one. After all, Zarcana and Gnostica play better with more players, right?
I think the decktet is an interesting idea. Being a math geek my first reaction was to think about the "card space". There are three of each numbered cards each representing two suits. A bit of quick math reveals that there are 15 distinct ways to pair up the suits in this manner. In the decktet as specified only 8 of those 15 are included, thus making some pairings more common/rare than others... Increasing the number of ranks to 15 (thus 2-16) results in a 57 card deck (3*15+6*2), but it makes the Aces and Crowns much more rare (21% of the deck instead of 1/3rd of the deck)...
...how would this work for dectana instead of using 2 decktet decks? -Dale