CARD GAME INVENTIONS
The Flowerdew Press has invented and reinvented a number of card games.
Invented games involve new games with new packs of cards, while reinvented games reimagine existing games with new or altered packs that change the probabilities behind the rules of those games.
THE GAME OF 36 BEASTS
A card-shedding game based on the traditional Chinese lottery called "Word Flowers".
The Game of 36 Beasts, or ‘Word Flowers’, is a lottery played around the world in the Chinese diaspora. A card is chosen at random from the 36 and placed in a sealed box in a public place.
People wager on the identity of the beast, which is revealed in a series of riddle-clue poems, sung or declaimed by a town crier.
Traditionally, people would use dreams to guess the identity of the winning card, often consulting soothsayers and dreambooks.
The characters on the cards each tell a story of the reincarnation of a soul, starting with the animal described, then becoming a person, then swapping souls with their Celestial Pair.
OGDOAD
Inspired by the notion of a game-playable Zener card set, Ogoad is an experimental pack of cards in 8 colours (sampled from Newton's rainbow) and featuring 8 shapes featuring the Neoplatonic mysteries (monad, dyad, triad, and tetrad) and the form constants of hallucination (Tunnel, Spiral. Web and Honeycomb). The four Neoplatonic forms can all be promoted to the aligning form constants, making for a set of cards in a partially directed acyclic graph relation. Playing a game of switch with the set is unforgettable.
