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.

What an awesome comment. Thanks again for writing, Trevor. For your information, the Kilodeck is now part of my work in progress Parallel Pastimes as well as being described on this wiki and in Mindhacker. Some responses and questions:

I would categorize most of your proposed 2^10 decks as Kilodeck variants. The important thing is that they have 10 features each with 2 values, which are ordered in a bigendian way, so each card can be written as a 10-bit binary number or "kyte". Each of your proposed decks contains 1024 cards and can be mapped in a consistent way onto the canonical Kilodeck. This is also critical.

I consider it aesthetically important that the graphics on a Kilodeck or variant cards be relatively unified and unitary. For example, each card in the canonical Kilodeck has one suit (a shape, either a circle or a triangle). This suit is in one of two colors, and either has a face or not. The card also has a number, one or two, which means the suit shape occurs either once or twice on the card. Thus, with essentially one graphic, a Kilodeck card represents four bits of information. Another friend was noodling around with Kilodeck cards, but his idea was to have 10 shapes on a card, each of which could represent one bit of information. This is too easy. Your Fantasy Character Kilodeck (see below) is far closer to the spirit I intended, even though it is far less abstract than my sample Kilodeck.

I like your Plaintext Kilodeck because it has the kind of integrity I'm thinking of, and because the Unicode characters have a built-in ordering. But can you really represent background colors in (some version or other) of Unicode? Please tell me; I'm too lazy to look it up right now. Smiley emoji goes here.

As for the piecepackr encoding section, I'm afraid I have no idea what you're talking about. The Curse of Knowledge strikes again!

In the original draft of the Kilodeck chapter in Parallel Pastimes, I mention that on planet Counter, "Since anyone can do what they want with it [it's 'commonsrighted'], people have been taking the structure and running with it -- monster-themed Kilodecks, Revolutionary War decks (rebels versus redcoats), pony decks for little girls and Bronies. I guess being able to break it into smaller pieces and customize it that way helps a lot too." I later decided the pony deck was derivative and decided to make it a a naked mole rat fancier deck (the Counterrans raise these "tunnelbunnies" as pets).

The Revolutionary War deck would come closest to your Fantasy Character Kilodeck. I had similar features in mind. I also remember thinking about a modern military Kilodeck with the two suits being something like tanks and aircraft. These could be used to play "various abstract deck-building games for the Kilodeck, such as QuarterMaster, DecKit, and Kilodeck the Halls, where the values of certain attributes determine what your card can do in a combat situation". The idea is that any Kilodeck variant that's isomorphic to the canonical deck can be used to play any standard Kilodeck game, just as you can play a bloodthirsty Texas Hold'em championship in Vegas with a childrens' Scooby Doo deck in real life, however incongruous it might seem.

Even though I've been thinking about the Kilodeck for a while, and have created the graphics for a couple, I've never printed a deck in real life, much less played a game with one, which is why I still consider it an imaginary game system for the purposes of Parallel Pastimes. However, I'd love to see what kind of Kilodecks you can generate with piecepackr, and if you can manage to wrangle decks through the print-on-demand process at someplace like The Game Crafter or DriveThruCards, I'll be the second to buy one.

RonHaleEvans. 2020-02-01 23:29 UTC.