Night Parade Fusion Playing Cards (Kickstarter)

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/iws/night-parade-fusion-playing-cards-hanafuda-poker

A multi-purpose deck of cards for playing Eastern and Western games!

Cost: ~US$15 per deck
Current funding level: just launched
Kickstarter ends: Dec 5, 2019

The Night Parade Fusion deck is the latest project from IndianWolf Studios. It is called a Fusion deck because it doubles as a standard deck of cards, and as a Hanafuda deck.

Hanafuda has an entry on BoardGameGeek, because it is a classic and special deck that originates in 18th century Japan. It is used to play a whole lot of different games, including favorite classics like Koi-Koi (popular in Japan) and Go Stop (popular in Korea).

IndianWolf Studios has come up with the clever idea of combining the Hanafuda deck with the traditional deck of playing cards most of us are familiar with today, so that you can play games from a variety of cultures. They have already created two previous Hanafuda "Fusion" decks, both with Japanese inspired art, as part of their successful Hanami Hanafuda and the Sensu Hanafuda projects. To learn more about these previous Fusion decks, see my article reviewing Hanafuda here: Not just a deck of cards, but a system of games with a rich heritage!

The Kickstarter project has images of sample cards from the forthcoming Night Parade Fusion deck, and you can see how these incorporates standard poker card icons/indices, and can be used for Hanafuda games as well.

The artwork of the Night Parade deck is polyptych in style, which means that the cards can be combined alongside each other to create a single larger image.

This deck takes its name from the stories that describes all the `yokai' that enter the human world at night. In Japanese folklore yokai is a broad term that includes a whole range of supernatural beings and strange phenomena, including monsters, spirits, and more. Stories range from describing the Night Parade of these yokai as an orderly procession traveling the roads to an unruly horde spreading pandemonium, and the Night Parade deck depicts the same diversity.

Printing is by the Expert Playing Card Company (EPCC), which is based in Taiwan. EPCC is one of the top playing card manufacturers today alongside the United States Playing Card Company, so the cards themselves are guaranteed to be high quality, durable, and to shuffle and handle smoothly.

The Night Parade Fusion deck will also come with a bonus 16-page full-color booklet containing the rules for the game Orochi. This is a 2-4 player shedding/climbing game that has been designed and created especially for this deck. The climbing game genre is a familiar one that includes popular card games like Tichu, The Great Dalmuti, President, and Big Two, so the addition of Orochi makes this deck of additional interest to card gamers.

What about Hanafuda games, and how do you play them? Already available from the publisher is a 236-page full-color Hanafuda rulebook that gives the rules for 37 different games that can be played with a Hanafuda deck. You can get this in a digital version or a printed version from Amazon (Hanami edition or Sensu edition) or Barnes & Noble (Hanami edition or Sensu edition). This massive rulebook is a world first, and is an extremely valuable resource, because clear rules for Hanafuda games are otherwise not readily available in English.

Kickstarter link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/iws/night-parade-fusion-playing-cards-hanafuda-poker

Disclaimer: I have no official relationship with the creator of this project, other than being a keen gamer and reviewer, as well as an enthusiast and collector of custom playing cards. I own a copy of the previous Hanafuda Fusion decks from IndianWolf Studios and also have their Hanafuda rulebook, and consider them outstanding.