Indy Mellink, a Dutch woman who loves card games, always found the gendered ranking of the face cards kind of weird — the king above the queen, the queen above the jack.
So she designed a gender-neutral deck, replacing the personalities on the face cards with metals — gold, silver and bronze. As a post on Card Player Lifestyle notes …
With the coronavirus raging in the Netherlands and everyone forced to stay home under lockdown rules, Indy had plenty of time on her hands. Already well-versed in graphic design, she began devoting her time to change the design of the card game. [snip]
Mellink stepped away from the idea of depicting individuals on the three playing cards altogether. She looked for a solution; something that represented a triad of easily recognizable values. Even people, or perhaps especially people, who had never played cards before and had never seen the gender-neutral card game, needed to understand immediately which order of precedence applied.
"I was looking for something new; something easy that everyone already knows. Finally I had a Eureka-moment: gold, silver, and bronze! Everyone already knows those three from sports like the Olympics medals."
If this piece of redesign tickles your fancy, you can pick up a deck at her site here.
This isn't the first project to try and tweak the gender roles on card decks; last year a young Israeli woman devised a deck replacing the three face cards with a new designation that has both male and female characters, like so …
She's got an Indiegogo campaign set up where you can order decks, too.
Are there any other examples of redesigns of the gendered cards? Feels like this is fertile soil that others may have tilled in the past …
