Playing With a Photo Card Deck

A card deck that gets read once, front to back, and put back in its box has been used as a badly bound book.

The shape is the feature. Cards are separable, shufflable and dealable, and everything below is a use a book physically cannot support.

Six things to do with it

1. One a day. Take one card each morning, leave it somewhere it will be seen — a mirror, a desk, a dashboard — and put it back at the end of the day. Fifty-two cards is a year of Mondays, or a little over seven weeks of every day.

2. Deal it round a table. For a group deck at a leaving do or a birthday. Everyone takes three, reads them out, and the room reconstructs the person from fifty-two fragments. It takes about twenty minutes and it is the best use of a group deck there is. Card decks as a group gift →

3. Guess the year. Deal five, put them in the order the photographs were taken, then check against a list of the years kept apart from the deck. Nobody is ever right, and the arguing is the game.

4. Pick one for someone. Hand a card to a person who is in it. This is the one that travels furthest — a card given away is the deck’s best advertisement for itself.

5. Leave one somewhere for them to find. In a bag before a trip, in a book, in a lunchbox. The simplest thing to do with a couple’s deck, and one of the best.

6. Add to it by hand. Keep a small notebook with the deck, and when a card brings up a story nobody had written down, write it there under that card’s caption. A deck that is added to over a year stops being a finished gift.

Three more, for a room full of people

Who wrote this? For a group deck. One person reads a card’s line aloud without showing the photograph; everyone else guesses which contributor wrote it. The contributor keeps quiet until the guesses are in. It works because people’s lines sound exactly like them, and the room knows it.

What happened next. For any deck. Draw a card and hand it to someone who is in the photograph. They have thirty seconds to tell what happened in the ten minutes after it was taken. The best stories in a deck are almost never the one the photograph shows.

The hot seat. For a birthday or a farewell. The person the deck is for draws a card, and whoever is in the photograph has to say one thing about them that is not on the card. Then the next card, round the room, until the deck runs out or the evening does. It produces the memories nobody thought to send.

Games for a family deck

A deck made for a grandparent, or for a whole family, plays differently, because the cards span generations and half the room was not born for some of them.

“Who is this?” Deal the old photographs to the children. They guess who the young person in the picture is — usually wrong, and delighted to be. The grandparent answers.

“Tell me about this one.” Each grandchild picks one card and asks for its story. It is the simplest way to get the stories told that otherwise never are, because a card in a child’s hand is a question an adult cannot put off.

Both work best at the gatherings a family already has — a Diwali evening, the night before a wedding, a long Sunday lunch — rather than as an organised activity.

If some of the faces belong to people who are no longer here, the game becomes the easiest way they get talked about. Children ask about a card without any of the hesitation adults bring to the subject, and the answers are often the first time they have heard those stories at all. Photographs of someone who has died →

Cards at the table

A use for the evening the deck is given, when the recipient and the contributors are in one room.

Use the cards as place cards. Before the dinner, put each guest’s own card at their seat — the one they sent, or the one they are in. People find their places by their faces, read each other’s lines across the table, and the deck is collected back into its box before dessert and handed over whole.

It turns the gift into the evening’s opening, rather than a box opened at the end when half the room has left. It only works when every guest has a card, so it suits a group deck made by the people at the dinner.

What makes a deck playable

Decisions made before printing, and they are cheap to get right:

Do not number the cards. A numbered deck has an order, and an order is a book.

Do not put dates on the cards. Keep a list of which year each photograph is from, on paper or on your phone — it keeps “guess the year” possible and it stops the deck sorting itself. Every card’s back carries the same printed design, like a playing card, so the faces are the only place anything personal goes.

Keep the lines short. A card that takes thirty seconds to read cannot be dealt round a table of ten. What goes on a photo card →

Making it last

A deck that is actually played with gets handled hundreds of times, which is the point, and a little care keeps it playable for years.

• Shuffle by hand, not by bending. The rounded corners and heavy card stock take handling well, but the springy riffle shuffle that arches every card will curve them over time. A plain overhand shuffle does not.
• Keep it in its box. The printed box is what stops cards drifting into bags and drawers one at a time. A deck missing six cards is still a deck; missing twenty, it is not.
• Not on a hot dashboard for long. One card on the dashboard for a day is fine; the whole deck left in a parked car through a North Indian May is not.

If it will be played hard, order a second copy at the proof stage. Extra copies of a designed piece cost less than the first, and they are printed and dispatched together. Later is harder: the photographs are deleted seven days after dispatch, so a copy months afterwards means sending everything again. Are my photos safe, and how long do you keep them? →

Why this is the argument for the format

A 24-page magazine at ₹699 holds about seventy-two photographs; a 27-card deck at ₹999 holds twenty-seven. The deck costs more and holds less.

What it buys is repeat use. A magazine is read two or three times over a decade. A deck that has a use — a card a day, a game, a thing left in a bag — gets touched hundreds of times.

Flat ₹70 delivery anywhere in India.

For long distance specifically

The use the format is best at.

Split the deck. Twenty-six cards each, and each of you turns one over on the same evening, then tells the other what came up. It is the closest a printed object gets to being in two places.

Post one at a time. A card in an envelope, once a fortnight, is a year of small arrivals for the price of one gift. Postage is trivial and the effect is not.

Make it travel both ways. Post a card with a line of your own on a slip beside it, and ask for it back the same way. A deck that travels in both directions is a different object from one that was given.

Long distance gift ideas →

Frequently asked

What do you do with a photo card deck? Deal it, take one a day, leave one for someone to find, or give individual cards away. It is built to be handled rather than read once.

Should the cards be numbered? No. Numbering imposes an order, and an order makes it a book.

Can you play games with it? Yes — dealing it round a table and guessing the year of each card both work, and both need short lines and no dates on the cards.

Is a deck worth more than a magazine? It holds less and costs more. What it buys is being picked up hundreds of times instead of read three times.

Can we add to it later? Not on the cards themselves: every back carries the same printed design, like a playing card, and the faces hold the photographs and captions. A notebook kept with the deck holds the stories the cards bring up, which is how a deck stops being a finished object.

Part of our guide to photo diaries and card decks. See also: card decks for couples and card decks as a group gift.

Built to be handled: Photo Card Deck from ₹999 · All 12 keepsakes