Review: Brick Playing Cards
Posted by Huw,
LEGO licensee Chronicle has been producing high quality books, jigsaw puzzles, notebooks and other LEGO-themed products for a couple of years now.
Its latest product is Brick Playing Cards, which contains two decks featuring colourful backs and minifigures on the royal cards.
The two decks are packaged in a thick glossy slip case, ideal for transportation.
The cards are stiff and frictionless and are easy to handle. The backs are decorated with a brick pattern which, perhaps unfortunately, is not diagonally symmetrical, so cards inserted into the deck the wrong way round will be identifiable.
The fronts are coloured to match the backs. The jack, queen, king and two jokers feature minifigure representations of the characters.
The strict adherence to matching colours has had the unfortunate effect of making the red suits light blue and the black ones dark blue on the blue deck, and light/dark red on the red deck. Of course this is not going to affect gameplay, but it may be confusing for youngsters, particularly if the instructions for the game they are playing refer to red and black suits.
Overall, then, they are a high-quality premium product, and perfect for introducing young children to card games.
They are available at Amazon.co.uk (£13.50) and Amazon.com ($16) so are certainly not cheap, and whether it's worth paying more for the LEGO theming than buying regular decks is for you to decide.
Thanks to Chronicle for sending me the product to review. All opinions expressed are my own.
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39 comments on this article
Huh, intriguing but not that interesting to be honest.
Crikey! Looks like the Vidiyo colour directors got into here too.
No way! I collect playing card decks too!
This is a match made in heaven!
What are the dimensions? Maybe its just my eyes, but the images make them look larger - I'm assuming they are the standard deck size (~6.5 x 9 cm).
I was tempted by these, and I like the use of minifigures, but I really don't like the colours - should have kept the usual black and red on white background. Maybe have more minifigures images throughout the deck? A bit pricey too.
Why so expensive tho when you can buy a desk of cards for £1 or less. Surely this should be a £7-£10 product at best.
The minifig face cards are fun, but why did they have to mess with the colors? Red spades & clubs and blue hearts and diamonds are just going to mess with kids trying to learn card games. You know, if they even do that anymore.
@kolaxanthe , they are 6.5x9cm.
Another useless cash grab. They even did not make different Kings etc.. Not to mention the garish colors.
I was at a a LEGO Store Thursday and these were available at something like a $4 discount, down to $12 with an additional purchase. I may have jumped at the chance to own these if they were a GWP but not for an additional purchase.
@Huw Are these cards plastic or cardboard?
I really like the idea, but the mashed up suit colors are a deal breaker for me. It is also a missed opportunity by them not to use better images of kings and queens and have them drawn from Classic Castle themes. Surely they could have found a creative way to do the jacks likewise.
@dugmence said:
" @Huw Are these cards plastic or cardboard?"
I'm no expert but I think plastic coated card.
I'm kind of disappointing that all of the picture cards are just the same images recoloured. They should all have been different, and in different poses to match traditional cards - like the King of Hearts should have been holding his sword behind his head. And there are so many different kings, queens and knights they could have used, it would have been great to see the different Castle eras represented.
I was intrigued when I heard about them but they're too lazy to really interest me.
I don't like the colour scheme to be honest. That and the price.
We have so many different card decks already, from classic styles to Frozen to Minions. Even a LEGO Friends one, which might not match this one in terms of quality, but the colours are way more pleasing to the eye and far less confusing. No need then for us for another LEGO one.
Gonna grab a deck for my kids. Thanks for the review, I didn’t know about these!
This is a hard pass for me!
I’m not colour blind, but these colours on the face of the cards are a bit trippy to me. Not a good combination IMO.
The colors are not comfortable to look at at all.
I'm gonna say it...$16 worth of LEGO at retail prices would be way better value for money.
Expensive, terrible for any kind of visual impairment and difficult to fan out if you're left handed. Nice idea, badly implemented
@Robibani said:
"…difficult to fan out if you're left handed…"
Why is discrimination against lefties still tolerated in this day and age?
The asymmetrical backs is a deal-breaker! What an oversight...
Unfortunately that is just terrible to not have diamonds/hearts in red and clubs/spades in black. Could have been dark blue/red at least. No way can I buy these.
And just as terrible to not have the backs symmetrical. Same again, no way would I ever knowingly buy a pack of cards like that.
Shame, they could have been good since the minifig jokers, K, Q, J look nice.
@wiggy said:
"I’m not colour blind, but these colours on the face of the cards are a bit trippy to me. Not a good combination IMO."
I am colour-blind and I'm struggling to see the different shades on the red playing cards.
????? ?????? ??????? ??????. ????? ????????, ??? ??????????? ??? ?????? ? "??????". ???????? ???????? ?????.
Such different shades of colors. It feels like I'm at a loss how to play "Fool". Strange color scheme.
They should try again but instead of fancy colors they give each suit its own classic theme (City, Castle, Space, Pirate), and make the symbols look like they're mosaics built out of bricks somehow. That'll attract the AFOLs.
Fix the functional issues at the same time.
They should have found a way to do One-Eyed Jacks and Suicide Kings.
Quite an achievement to make something based around Lego so utterly joyless.
I love seeing a franchise's version of playing cards, chess and monopoly. It's interesting to see what represents each card/piece.
I’d read these were due out today, and that they’d be available for about a week. Turns out my local LEGO Store sold out of their handful yesterday. Where the Ninjago Brickheadz were PWP first, and you could buy them as regular sets ice the promo ended, I was told they were allowed to sell the cards at full price Friday, and any left on Saturday would be available with the PWP offer. There may have been confusion about that, since they sold out before the promo started.
@Robibani:
I’m a rightie, and I usually use both hands to get a clean fan.
@bananaworld:
Where money is involved (especially casinos and professional gamblers), there might be insistence on a 180° symmetrical card back. For family game night, or solitaire, where you’re less likely to get hustled, a souvenir deck ,with photographic card fronts and backs, may be preferred.
@955561976:
I’m not colorblind, but these are still pretty hard on the eyes. If they released another deck with a LEGO coral color scheme, it might be enough to burn your retinas.
@TheOtherMike:
One of my childhood friends couldn’t play poker with these because he liked to call those as trump.
Huw has only shown the images for the diamonds suit; one-eyed jacks are traditionally represented on spades and hearts and suicide king on hearts. What they got wrong here illustration-wise is that the king of diamonds traditionally holds an axe next to his head in profile with the blade facing towards the back of his head (the only face card amongst the Js and Ks with an axe), so he can be played as either a suicide king or the unique one-eyed king.
I do like that the two jokers have differing expressions.
@Huw, I'd be curious to see the other representations of the K, Q and J on the other suits.
@PurpleDave said:
"I’d read these were due out today, and that they’d be available for about a week. Turns out my local LEGO Store sold out of their handful yesterday. Where the Ninjago Brickheadz were PWP first, and you could buy them as regular sets ice the promo ended, I was told they were allowed to sell the cards at full price Friday, and any left on Saturday would be available with the PWP offer. There may have been confusion about that, since they sold out before the promo started.
@Robibani:
I’m a rightie, and I usually use both hands to get a clean fan.
@bananaworld:
Where money is involved (especially casinos and professional gamblers), there might be insistence on a 180° symmetrical card back. For family game night, or solitaire, where you’re less likely to get hustled, a souvenir deck ,with photographic card fronts and backs, may be preferred.
@955561976:
I’m not colorblind, but these are still pretty hard on the eyes. If they released another deck with a LEGO coral color scheme, it might be enough to burn your retinas.
@TheOtherMike:
One of my childhood friends couldn’t play poker with these because he liked to call those as trump."
Just for clarification of my point about lefties, I can only easily fan the cards one way. I was just suggesting that all they need to do is put them in all 4 corners. It's a very minor thing in comparison to the the terrible colours but still a valid design issue (IMHO)
@Robibani:
No, I get what you’re saying, and knew where you were heading with this. I don’t know how standard I am for righties, but I hold the hand in my left, pluck individual cards with my right hand (or sometimes flick the front card out with my left thumb), and can manage a one-handed fan with my left thumb...but I usually do it two-handed so the result isn’t quite so ragged, and I don’t have to go hunting for cards that might be stuck behind others. I know people who build their hand, one card at a time, whether they do so as it’s dealt, or afterwards. There are other ways to achieve a fanned hand besides doing it one-handed, and I believe it’s possible to do one-handed fans with either hand. I do think it’s probably easier with the right hand (swiping the thumb along your fingertips from pinky to index), which is kind of how I do it two-handed, but with my left hand I can run my thumb down the length of my middle finger while retracting all four fingers.
I can't be doing with products that put novelty above practicality. The colours are a fundamental aspect of a pack of cards. It wouldn't have been difficult to keep the red and black scheme, irrespective of the card design.
No thanks.
I can’t believe that no one has mentioned it is $16 for 108 parts. That’s nearly 15 cents per part, and it’s not even Star Wars. I understand you are getting 28 minifigures, but only four of them have legs. Plus it appears that you will need to download the instructions from the app, so once they stop supporting the app we will have no idea how to play Go Fish.
The Joker should have been the Batman Joker obviously :)
@Reinier:
Ah, if you’re going to do that, make it a TLBM-themed deck, with KQJ being Batman, Batgirl, and Robin. Then make the 36 numbered cards different villains from the movie, with the four most popular as the aces (excluding Joker, of course).
What's up with the edge of the sleeve? It's most noticeable in the first picture after the break. First I thought the edge was damaged, then I considered a bright band of reflected light across the edge. Zooming in it looks more like foil and at the light green brick even like tape.
@kingalbino said:
"Why so expensive tho when you can buy a desk of cards for £1 or less. Surely this should be a £7-£10 product at best."
1. Take a product that has been perfected since decades of not centuries.
2. Pay for redesigning it nonetheless, but don't pay too much, so that the useful features can be identified and kept.
3. Realise that the result will only appeal to the most hardcore collectors, and thus will sell in low amounts, requiring a high price.
4. Realise that the aforementioned collectors will happily pay even more than the required high price.
5. Set an even higher price to suggest value and exclusivity, then use the resulting profits to fund more similar inane product crossovers.