What do you collect (other than boardgames)?

Going to have to admit that (after writing some books on divination) I now collect dice and playing cards. I was in denial about this for a while :slight_smile:

It’s not about having 100 dice for gaming, more collecting individual beautiful objects. Here’s one made out of amber:

And Playing Cards now have a huge range of gorgeous art in a way they didn’t even a few decades ago:

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Here’s me researching the history of playing cards in the British Museum, which is a totally normal thing to do. I love the fact that court cards used to have feet, until (about 200 years after this really should have been noticed) people realised they were turning the cards the right way up as they held them, which they didn’t do with pip cards, giving away that they had a good hand!

(If you want a deck with the feet which looks like the English style on that page, I recommend the Highlanders deck - even though it’s technically an 1864 poker deck: Highlanders 1864 Reproduction Playing Cards USGS – PlayingCardDecks.com )

And while I have a few conventional card decks, here’s a replica of a weirder one: “Cries of London” from 1754. It features the real street sellers of that year, yelling things like BUY MY EELS, and the meta brilliance of the Six of Hearts showing someone auctioning nine copies of this deck because it’s obviously such a trendy item.

And then there’s world cards which are different from the western playing card deck, like Japanese Hanafuda cards (one company which started making handmade Hanafuda cards in 1889 was a little one you may have heard of called ‘Nintendo’).

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Anyway, yeah, books are probably the item I have the most of, but dice and playing cards are catching up. Because I needed more things to buy. (My board game collection is tiny by comparison, but the wishlist is long).

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