As I was getting together
a Firefly Role Playing game I thought it would be fun if we started
out playing a game of Tall Card. After a brief search on web, I
found the rules posted at http://www.fireflywiki.org/Firefly/TallCard. Basically, it's Poker with six suits. I also found a lot
of queries from people wishing someone connected with the show would
make some cards we loyal fans could play the game. As I was one
of those wishing masses, I realized three things. One, that
probably wasn't going to happen before I ran my game. Two, if I
wanted a deck of cards, I'd have to make it myself. Three, if I
was going to go through all that trouble, why not share?
I had two goals in
designing this deck: To make a deck that looked like it came from the
Firefly Universe, and to not waste all the ink in my printer. I
also didn't want to spend a lot of time on this (it took me about a
week to create the deck... okay, I was up till 3:00 in the morning
most of that week, but I also have a day job, so it evens out).
My solution was to draw rough sketched line figures that looked like
they were drawn quickly (see the Legend below).
The Chinese is
real. I got the Chinese characters from this site: http://www.tigernt.com/cgi-bin/cedict.cgi
it's a Chinese/English online Dictionary. You enter and English
word, and get the Chinese Characters and pronunciation back. The
pictures are very tiny (
).
That's the glyf for Firefly, by the way. The result is these
cards inadvertently serve the practical purpose of teaching Chinese...
okay, a tiny bit of Chinese, but it's a start. You can
learn a lot more interesting Chinese at http://fireflychinese.home.att.net/
