Game Jargon Definition: “Card Deck”

Card Deck (noun) - / kärd dek /

Also referred to as a “deck of cards,” or simply a “deck,” a card deck is a stack of cards, very often randomized through shuffling, that is then dealt to players around the game table or used as a supply from which players may draw additional cards to use as a resource during the game—or both. Whether they are traditional playing cards or any number of game-specific cards, a card deck is nothing but a stack of printed paper, typically of cardboard material, with printed-on illustrations, icons, and/or text, that game designers have incorporated into the rules of a given game.

Games that include cards decks typically employ game mechanics such as a limited or hidden information, some amount of “randomness” or luck-of-the-draw hand management, hand-limit mechanics, and potentially card-advantage mechanics, to name a few.

While plenty of tabletop games do not use decks of cards as a component or mechanic at all, in those that do, the number of cards and decks of cards varies greatly from game to game. Some games may use only a single deck of as little as 10 to 15 cards, while other games may have dozens of decks of cards totaling 1,000 cards or more, possibly even using cards of different physical sizes.

Some examples of games that prominently feature card decks include: collectable and trading card games such as Magic: the Gathering (1993) and Pokémon (1996); living card games such as Arkham Horror: The Card Game Revised Edition (2021) and Marvel Champions: The Card Game (2019); and a number of other games, including:  Imperial Settlers (2014), Terraforming Mars (2016), High Society (2018), It’s a Wonderful World (2019), Skull Tales Full Sail (2019), Moonrakers (2020), Lawyer Up (2021), Radlands (2021), and ISS Vanguard (2022).