#ik its bonkers but this game does use a tarot deck

[thepringlesofblood]

Zarcana Rules

(both as "rules for the game Zarcana" and as "Zarcana RULES!!!")

the board/card game Zarcana is maybe the most obscure shit I've ever played. my friend from middle school introduced it to me, from an out of print board game box found deep in the back of the sci library.

If you're familiar with Looney Pyramids (and the associated games such as Ice House, Martian Chess, Zendo, and Pyramid Arcade), this is one of thems.

It isn't sold. You can't buy it. You can get some Looney Pyramids, and if you have the pre-existing knowledge of how to play it you can get a tarot deck and do that. You can buy Gnostica, which is the more widely used adaptation of Zarcana. You could find Pyramid Arcade on eBay (it isn't in print anymore) or buy the pamphlet on looneylabs.com which includes Zark City, another adaptation, and recommends Gnostica on the back of the pamphlet. But to the free market, Zarcana does not exist.

It only exists in archives. Websites from 1999-2002.

I want to put all the information on Zarcana I can find online in one place, bc it's really hard to find a concrete set of rules online bc of how old it is, and it's really really fun.

Cheatsheet

Rules (it says you need to buy a special deck of zarcana cards but you do not, you just need a complete (78 cards) deck of tarot cards)

This lovely website that has links to articles about the development of Zarcana and Gnostica, as well as pdf printable stickers you can put on your cards so the rules are all on there.

If you don't have Looney Pyramids, I figured out how to macgyver it w coins of different sizes but it's v hard and complicated. will put under the cut.

so each person playing needs 5 small, 5 medium, and 5 large pyramids.

personally, I was able to replace them with 5 pennies, 5 nickels, and 5 dimes.

as a game piece, the things a pyramid needs to do are

be 3 different sizes (you can use 3 different denominations of coin)

be distinguishable b/w players (if it's just 2 of you, you can do heads & tails, if not you'll need either more denominations of coins or some way to mark coins as belonging to a certain person (nail polish, stickers, poster putty, beads, sticky notes?)

point in directions (instead, you can put the coin on the edge of the card that it's pointing to, or in the center for standing up straight. alternately, you could use the heads/whatever symbol on the coin to point to different directions and then due tails as standing straight up)

also here's the urls directly copy-pasted in case the links break or some shit