On the road

Decks that ride in a jacket pocket

A card game earns its place in a backpack differently than on a shelf. It has to survive sand, a tilted camp table and being played on the lid of a cooler. Our boxes are small on purpose. This is what we have learned about taking them along.

The box is the packing list

A deck with no board, no tokens and no setup grid travels whole. If a game needs a flat clean surface and twelve pieces, it stays home. Cards can be dealt on a towel, a tray or the back seat of a car, and a lost card announces itself at the next shuffle.

Waiting rooms and layovers

The natural habitat of a pocket deck is dead time: the airport gate, the campsite before dinner, the cabin evening when the phones have no signal. Rounds that fit in minutes match the shape of waiting. You can stop the moment the line moves and nobody loses anything.

Keep the cards dry, keep the rest loose

Cards forgive almost everything except water. A zip bag inside the box costs nothing and saves the deck at the beach. Everything else, including bent corners and a little sand in the box, is history the deck picks up along the way.

A keychain is a scout

The plush keychains of the card characters started as a joke in our office and turned out to be the flag people find each other by. Clip one to the bag that carries the deck. At a picnic with three families, the bag with the taco on it is where the game is.