Published through Chronicle Books by board game designer Travis Nichols, the Heckadeck is a 160 card deck of playing cards designed to work with many different card game systems, but also to allow far larger numbers of players for traditional set-building games like Go Fish, Old Maid, Bullshit, and Gin Rummy.
Much like the very similar Everdeck by efofecks, the Heckadeck uses eight suits sorted into four colours: Hearts and diamonds are red; clubs and spades are black; clouds and daggers(or swords) are blue, and acorns and planets are green. Every suit has sixteen base ranks here in ascending order of value, before jokers and other special cards are accounted for: 0, A, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 19, 10, 11, Beast, J, Q, K. The special cards include four "Travelers" and four "Hunters," each of which have two suits at the same time, one all-suited "Watcher," eight coloured but suitless "Arrows" and eight coloured but suitless "Talismans," one "Omnihedron" (a Talisman of all colours), four suitless "Jokers" for the four colours, and a "Crone" and "Darkness" pair of cards which exhibit neither suits nor colours. In addition to these 160 playing cards, the deck also includes - to quote Nichols:
a blank-faced card for whatever addition you want, and 1 card that MUST BE DESTROYED. Don’t ask why, just destroy it, quick!
Nichols encourages Heckadeck owners to photograph or video the destruction of the card which MUST BE DESTROYED, and posting it on
social media.
The most blatant weakness of the Heckadeck, compared to the Everdeck, is that Heckadeck card designs are extremely simplistic for all of the pip cards. None of the pip cards is able to serve any real purpose other than being a pip card, where the Everdeck piles on lots of extra design features that allow pip cards to still have many uses for card games (and cartomancy divination systems) which rely on non-numerical features of a card.
The Heckadeck was the result of a successful 2018 Kickstarter campaign run by Nichols, which received overwhelming support and met its funding goals very early. I generally consider it inferior to the Everdeck, Pixie Cards, and Dicecards as a multi-game system overall, but it is very adequate for use by children in particular, and for groups with more than four players, due to the very large number of cards. This also makes it unwieldy to shuffle, but we cannot have everything!
Iron Noder 2024, 18/30