Double Fanucci Project

     In brief, Double Fanucci is a legendary card game that appears in various Zork games. I say in brief, because the legendary part of the game concerns the rules of play which are fantastically, comically, unbelievably long. In the Zork universe, the game deck is described as having 174 cards divided into 15 suits and 9 face cards. The suits are:

• Mazes
• Books
• Rain
• Bugs
• Fromps
• Inkblots
• Scythes
• Plungers
• Faces
• Time
• Lamps
• Hives
• Ears
• Zurfs
• Tops

     The face cards are:

• Granola
• Death
• Light
• Snail
• Beauty
• Time
• Grue
• Lobster
• Jester

Suit cards have a value of 0-9 and infinity, for a total of 165 cards.

     The underlying joke of Double Fanucci is that it's never fully explained how to play the game. References to obscure and complex rules are found throughout Zork, going so far as to indicate that if all the play variations were written down, it would make a book too heavy to lift, much less read. Variations can range from certain cards having different values, to the entire game structure being dependent on the phase of the moon and the lineage of players at the table.
     The online MMORPG Legends of Zork has a nice feature where cards are randomly dropped after fight encounters. Players can take these cards and arrange them into different Double Fanucci gambits in their inventory to unlock certain buffs or penalties on their character. True to the mysterious spirit of the game, no documentation can be found on what combinations trigger what effects, leaving it to the player to explore combinations to see what works and what doesn't.
This can only lead to one simple conclusion. I want my own deck.
     The danger of knowing a little art coupled with a DIY attitude is that normal limits get stretched. Normally if I wanted my own Double Fanucci deck, I'd hop online and do some searching. If Amazon or eBay doesn't have a deck then I'd conclude that it doesn't exist. If it doesn't exist, than I'd have to drop it and leave my longing to fester into a perpetual ache that would never fully disappear.
     But that's not the case, so we move on to phase two which is planning a project.
     First, I need some artwork. The two guys who designed the beautiful deck in Legends of Zork do stellar work. But I don't want to do a cut-and-paste job for my deck. The suits are simple enough to make, so I'll start there. The face cards should be special, requiring more time and effort so I'll save those for later. This will give me some time to design a common theme to run through them. The deck is huge, and there are only a handful of face cards so I want to do something that makes them really stand out.
     I'll start by sketching out the suits in pencil, then inking them in later. Once the images are inked, I'll scan them into Photoshop for color and texture. I want the suit numbers to be same across the deck, so I'll use a font in Photoshop for that.
     I'll cheat on backgrounds. I say cheat because there are two ways I can create a background for the cards. I can paint a background on canvas and scan it, or create the background in Photoshop from scratch. Painting will take about 20 minutes, and Photoshop will take about 6 hours. There are some things I can do in Photoshop faster than I can paint, but backgrounds aren't one of them so this is going to be a job for old school paints.