Hasta La Gadget!

Look at these beautiful playing cards that feature a Steampunk Cthulhu theme. They were created by Nat Iwata, an artist based in Vancouver. These are real works of art that you can play poker with.

This custom playing card set features awesome artwork on back, and the face cards include scenes and characters from Lovecraft’s story. Nat decided to create these Steampunk Cthulhu Resurrection cards as a follow up to his original Steampunk Cthulhu cards from about a year ago.

Nat has also made some custom Cthulhu coins that you can buy with the deck, which will complete your Cthulhu poker night or allow you to start one. Nat has really outdone himself with this set. I don’t know which is cooler, the cards or the coins.

He has already met his Kickstarter goal and it still has a couple of weeks to go. A pledge of at least $10(USD) will get you a deck of cards, while $15 will get you the cards and one coin.

[via Nerd Approved]

For graphic designers, playing cards are a playground: The simple constraints of four suits and thirteen different cards accommodate tons of creativity without overcomplicating things. And there’s an amazing number of interesting decks out there.

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Hiroshi Yamauchi was Nintendo’s third and arguably most important president. When he took the reins from his grandfather in 1949, the Japanese company specialized in the manufacture of playing cards for its home market — first Japanese-style cards and then, under Yamauchi’s guidance, Western-style ones too. By the time he handed over control to Satoru Iwata 53 years later, he’d overseen the creation of all Nintendo’s game consoles up to the GameCube and become one of Japan’s richest men — in other words, not a bad innings for a man who passed away today at the ripe old age of 85.

Filed under: Gaming, Nintendo

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Source: Hiroko Tabuchi (Twitter), Nikkei (Japanese)

Game of Thrones is one of my favorite shows on TV in years, but I’ve been trying to find ways to pass the time while waiting for the return of the show on March 31. I’m a gambler too, so I think a few hands of poker could be a good time-killer until the return of the Starks, Lannisters, Targaryens, Baratheons, and all of the other denizens of Westeros in about a month and a half.

These hand-illustrated Game of Thrones playing cards were designed by artist Paul Nojima after getting the idea from a concept design he saw from artist Jim Tuckwell. While Tuckwell had only designed a handful of cards, while Nojima has actually produced an entire deck of cards.

The deck is printed on high quality 310gsm card stock, and includes illustrations of all of your favorite (and most hated) characters on the face cards, and the Aces have been illustrated with sigils from four houses. I also love how the Jokers are Lord Baelish and Lord Varis – how perfect is that?

You can get your hands on a deck of these Game of Thrones cards over on Etsy for $20. They’re also available in an faux aged version, if you’re into that sort of thing.

While they’re not the first Legend of Zelda playing cards, these ones are still quite beautiful, and a worth addition to any Zelda collection. They were made to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the game, and are imported from Japan.

They’re an officially licensed Nintendo product, and feature images from all of the past Zelda games. On the back of every card there are four variations of Link. They look like quality cards and are nicely detailed.

You can buy the set on Amazon for anywhere from about $17 to $30(USD). It’s dangerous (and sometimes boring) to go alone. Take these cards with you and play some poker during your downtime.

[via Geekalerts]