Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/23/gender-neutral-playing-cards.html
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The chess sets with two monarchs are going to be very confusing.
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Interesting that this was by a Dutch person - they’re surely aware of the German playing cards (the ones we use with hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades, king, queen, and jack are the French cards).
Besides having different suits (hearts, leaves, bells, and acorns), the German cards have different face cards - Konig (king), ober (upper officer), and unter (lower officer). Half the suits could have kings and half queens (Konig / Konigin - same first letter) and the officers could be any gender.
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That sound you heard was a whole bunch of conservatives being triggered. Oh, the punditing they will do when they see this.
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And Spanish (and neapolitan) card have jack, horse and king. And the seds are swords, club, cups and golds.
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Haha! The “War on war!”
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My Tarot deck replaced the all-masculine Knights and Pages with two guys and two girls apiece. I kept Kings and Queens though.
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I gots to say, as a liker of various forms of playing cards, I’m not at all into the gold/silver/bronze thing. It’s a bit anodyne; if you’re going in that direction, why not just have cards numbered 1-13 in plain Helvetica Neue? I could actually get behind that more.
But I’d much prefer to keep the personified face cards and just do it in a way that doesn’t entangle gender with rank. Like, I dunno, replace jack, queen and king with variously-gendered representations of the three Fates, or the trimurti, or something else where the numbering doesn’t connote “better” or “worse”. (Especially since in most card games, the king isn’t “better than” the queen).
I’m triggered by the lack of rotational symmetry.
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Also, Bronze of Diamonds is hard to process. I do like the principle, though, and will spend the next several hours considering variations.
This is a nice idea. I’ve been on the hunt for a Tarot deck without gender or possibly one without any human figures at all.
(Fractal tarot is very nice, but is less abstract than the art not really connected to the value at all.)
Definitely a distraction while trying to count cards.
Yes. Why is the king so helpless? Why does he have to have the queen defeat his enemies? I was intrigued enough to look it up. There is a nice table here…
The King was always the King.
The Queen was a Minister or Royal Vizier sort of person, and could only move one square diagonally. But there was a variant of chess that probably started in Valencia, about 1470, called “Mad Queen Chess” (Italian alla rabiosa = “with the madwoman”), where after an accident presumably involving radioactivity, Her Majesty got her Hulk-like powers to dash across the board and slaughter.
The other pieces were bishops=elephants, knights=cavalry, rooks=chariots, and pawns=infantry.
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On trying to come up with another trio to replace the King, Queen, Jack dynamic with I hit on the states of matter. Solid, Liquid, Gas. You could probably also have some fun and replace the four suites with appropriate examples like water, so the illustration of the Solid of Water card would be ice and so forth.
Edit: I suppose Aces would be Plasma?
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I ordered the 2-deck set (largely to justify the international shipping costs, but also two get both colors) and I’ll be blunt; I have a print on demand tarot deck that was more expensive than this, but it’s more of an art purchase than actual use. (it’s the Windrow-Ravenswood tarot by Tormented Artifacts, for the curious) Well worth it as an art piece, because I’m not fool enough to perform a divination using a reproduction of a cursed artifact… 
(The guidebook for said deck is also worth the purchase as well.)
It’s a game where if pawns go all the way they become queens. If anything it might make the game more acceptable to Republicans.
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One of the great quirks of cards is that “face cards” can be specified for some games, “ok, sevens and one eyed jacks are wild this hand.”
I think the French variant of card suits is most common because it is better than German (and others) for many games-- red suits vs black suits, simplicity of the suit symbols. I would prefer to keep royalty but if somebody changed queen to emperess and made her the highest-ranking face card I could go with that. The neutral “monarch” is good too, for gaming you could specify which gender monarch had different value, etc.
Cards are an amazing invention. So many games come out of such a simple setup.
There’s no way Republicans are going to let a pawn become a queen. They’ll tell the pawn to pull itself up by its bootstraps, then sacrifice it.
I’d go for a rule change where four or more pawns of any colour could be moved so as to form a union and depose the queen.
