What’s Different about the 10th Anniversary Decks by 57 Cards?

What’s Different about the 10th Anniversary Decks by 57 Cards?

In November, 57 Cards will be shipping (for the first time) a fully plastic deck of cards that contains a “bird” in them.  Up until now, our “wild” card was the logo design.

It’s hard to play a game where players are always saying, “who’s got the bird?” without a bird card.

One of my favorite reviews of all time on Amazon was actually from a 2-stars rating with the following hilarious write-up:

The bird must have flew the coop
November 2, 2015

“The quality of the cards is great….but I bought them because we play Rook a lot and we were surprised to say the least that there wasn’t “a bird”. The wild card, or bird, is actually a flower. Needless to say many jokes have been made about the set. “I bet he has the flower” just isn’t the same as having the bird. If buying for Rook, I’d look elsewhere to a set that actually has the classic bird.”

First of all, I can’t believe its been 10 years since we created our first fully plastic deck of rook-like cards.  If there was one thing I didn’t realize when I first started out, was that there are so many others that love play the card game Rook, but that also were replacing their decks so often that it was getting expensive.

Since then, we have had 8 different versions of the deck get produced.  Each time we learned something new.  We learned there are games people play with rook cards that require 2 “wilds”.  We learned yellow is a difficult color to work with plastic printing.  We learned individuals that have issues distinguishing color could benefit when there are designs on the numbers.  We learned that there are a number of people that have issues distinguishing red and green.  Finally,  we learned that playing a bird game without a bird for some is just a little strange.

Our basic tenant held true.  Create a deck that is durable and long-lasting.

The New 10th Anniversary decks are still:

  • Fully plastic and durable
  • Contain 1-14 of the colors Red, Green, Black, and Yellow.
  • Have 2 Wild Cards

What is New:

  • The Wild Cards in the deck are now Bird designs.
  • The colors now have a distinguishing design on them.

 

The biggest change in this new 10th anniversary deck is that we have swapped out the branded “wild” cards with silhouetted bird cards.  There are still two in every deck.  The most requested adjustment was to include a bird in the deck.  People didn’t care what type of bird.  It could have been a turkey…

Instead we ran a voting process and took the two most popular choices from the survey respondents.

 

Originally the bird was supposed to be a colored figure as above.  But once again, the masses spoke.  We heard a number of requests to simply to silhouette.  We adjusted and took a re-vote.  Through the democratic process, we ended up with the silhouetted bird versions below.

Now having the deck in hand, it all seems to have come together very well [saying this as a player of Rook].

Only regret I have is not doing this 10 years ago 🙂

We hope the next 10 years will keep bringing more ways to make family game nights more enjoyable!

This deck is now fully stocked and ready for shipping.

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