Kickstarter: King’s Game Playing Cards by Bona Fide Playing Cards

The King's Game Playing Cards is Bona Fide Playing Cards' take on the ancient and universal game: Chess. The theme has been done several times by Ellusionist with the Knights deck and recently, Murphy's Magic Queens Playing Cards, but not fully illustrated like the King's Game Playing Cards currently funding on Kickstarter.

Popularized in Europe during the Middle Ages, Chess became a favorite among the higher class and at some point was even used to teach war strategy to nobility and royalty, thus being dubbed as the game of the Kings. With this in mind, designer Karin Yan brought together a deck that aims to represent all the different aspects of chess while adding a regal touch to it.

King’s Game features an entire game set within one deck where the back depicts a globe-like chess board and the different chess pieces are unconventionally distributed among the court cards forming two houses: The Black house represented by Spades and Clubs and the White house represented by Hearts and Diamonds. Karin explained,

With this distribution, I intended to focus my design on the figures that each chess piece represents more than focusing on the pieces themselves. That being said, I also didn’t want to leave out a major factor in a game of chess, which is the number of pieces played by each player and that’s how the unconventional one and two-way court cards were created.

Regardless of the unconventional court cards, the deck was designed to be both artistic and functional at the same time, with standard number cards and clear indices and pips making them perfectly playable.

There are two tucks available in the Kickstarter campaign- The Black game, with gold and black foil, and the White game, with copper and silver foil. The tucks depict two Kings playing a game of chess (one on the front and one on the back).

The King's Game Playing Cards will be printed by the Expert Playing Card Co., and pledge starts at €13 for a single deck. Check it out on Kickstarter here!

If King’s Game is successfully funded, Karin aims to create a follow-up deck depicting the Lewis chessmen and there’s a chance that the chess series will be completed with an oriental Shogi (Japanese chess) inspired deck.