Comments on Kilodeck

Just for fun I've brainstormed some alternate 2^10 deck schemes (not sure if I should properly call them a "Kilodeck" but they do have a 2^10 structure).

"Plaintext Kilodeck"

With the right Unicode font (like an ideal Piecepack diagram font this may not exist yet) each "card" can be represented by a single character in software platforms (i.e. most terminals, word processors, web browsers) that support foreground/background colors.

Eight French Suits:

1. Filled or Not-Filled (in Unicode "Black" or "White")

2. Pointy-Bottom or Flat-Bottom (traditionally also "Light" versus "Dark")

3. Peach-Shaped or Not-Peach-Shaped (in Mandarin Spades and Hearts are literally "black peach" and "red peach")

Eight Combining Diacritics:

4. One or Two

5. Dots or Accents

6. Above or Beneath (the suit)

Four Combining Enclosing characters (Square, Diamond, Circle, Triangle)

7. Pointy-Top or No-Pointy-Top

8. Flat-Bottom or No-Flat-Bottom

Four Color schemes

9. Black or Red

10. Normal or Inverted

Variants: Use the wide variety of arrows (different shapes and orientations) instead of French suits. Instead of color schemes use even more combining glyphs (in particular wide variety of horizontal, diagonal, vertical lines) to overlay the character to reach 2^10 combinations.

"Fantasy Character Kilodeck"

Each "card" is a portrait of a fantasy-themed character. Converting Kilodeck cards into concrete characters may help in Kilodeck memory competitions and Kilodeck card counting. Also could be an RPG game aid (i.e. character generator and/or portraits).

1. Male or Female
2. Old or Young
3. Pointy-Ears or Non-Pointy-Ears
4. Tall or Short
5. Shield or No-Shield
6. Armor or No-Armor
7. Ranged or Melee weapon
8. Blunt or Bladed weapon
9. Magical or Muggle
10. Rural or Urban

i.e. Male Old Pointy-Ears Tall No-Shield Armor Ranged Bladed Mundane Rural character could be an example of an Elven ranger (in light armor armed with a longbow).

Other potential variant binary portrait choices (some maybe difficult to capture in a picture):

1. Noble or Common
2. Mount or No-Mount
3. Familiar or No-Familiar companion animal
4. Long or Short hair
5. Black or Non-Black hair
6. Good or Evil
7. Lawful or Chaotic

Of course could be fun to do a 2^10 binary scheme for Sci-Fi/Western/Mundane characters or perhaps Animals.

piecepackr encoding

As a thought exercise what would be best way to map a Kilodeck onto piecepackr for making game diagrams? Perhaps 16 different background/border "configurations" corresponding to each of your 16 different 64-card subdecks? Then 8 "suits" for each combination of the three "suit" characteristics". This leaves 8 "ranks" for the remaining three characteristics. Or perhaps go with the extreme of just one configuration, one rank, and 2^10 suits (convert back and forth from binary integer representations). Of course "pmap_piece" allows one to use a "trans" function to first manipulate the spreadsheet input before passing to "grid.piece" so one could structure the game diagram info spreadsheet in other ways other than the internal piecepackr representation (i.e. use a whopping 10 binary columns for each characteristic).

TrevorLDavis. 2020-01-23 19:31 UTC.