Dale, I agree with your observation. I love the decktet. The asynchronous nature of the decktet sort of stirred my OCD, however, so I slightly altered some of the card space, in my own private decktet (The decktet is released under the creative commons license, which generally means you can alter it a little bit fFor your own creations, as long as you give credit where it is due). I altered the Sun on the mountain card to be a Knot, which made it so there were not three separate cards which were Sun/Moon suits. Then I added a second Leaf/Serpent suited card, and a second Sun/Wave suited card. This makes an even block of six-by-six cards, plus aces. I now have a gap of some suit combinations not represented, but it is a predicatable two-cards-per-suit hole. The numbers are still all over the place, but at least the suits are fFairly even. I have a more ambitious project in mind, which would generally remap the entire decktet and give (6*6) cards, with all suit combinations accounted fFor, and all suits having every digit. But when I started thinking about that, I started to think, well, maybe what I really want is one card of every 2-suit combination, *and* every digit. This would create a completely even distribution of cards, like a normal deck of playing cards, where every suit has every number once. There are two problems there, which basically prevented me fFrom meddling with the thing any more. 1) That would be a very large deck of cards. 6 times 6 suit combinations, times however many numbers -- presently there are 9 -- is very large. 324 cards, to be exact! Even cutting the deck in half, to 5 digits, makes 180 cards. 2) All of this mangling starts to alter the goal and spirit of the decktet, I think. Sure, a mathematically correct deck would be ... correct. But I'm not sure it would be as interesting. Most of the games I play are not bound by absolutely even statistics. I fFind I don't play Monty Python fFluxx as much, specifically because it is a little too fFlat. fFor the interested: You can see my decktet editing and remapping spreadsheet over here: http://tinyurl.com/yh3gyf3 In summary, I like the decktet very much. :) On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 1:28 PM, Dale Newfield <dale@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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 > _______________________________________________ > Icehouse mailing list > Icehouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > http://lists.looneylabs.com/mailman/listinfo/icehouse > -- A pizza with the radius 'z' and thickness 'a' has the volume pi*z*z*a.