I came up with a new pyramid game variant while searching for the origin of a cool square Tarot deck I spotted in the Gnostica image gallery at BGG. At closer examination, it wasn’t ideal for use in Gnostica or Zarcana because too many of the major arcana were renamed—and who would want to mark up such a pretty deck? There aren’t many other square decks; I found only the Insecta Obscura tarot and the AI-assisted Caticorn tarot. But along the way, I stumbled across some less problematic round decks, and a dreadful idea was born: Hexcana.
Ideally Hexcana would be played with a hexagonal tarot deck, but these range from expensive to vaporware; many apparent hex tarot are merely tarot-adjacent and inadequate for playing Zarcana-style games. Fortunately, circles will do to make a hex board instead of the usual Zarcana-style grid.
At first I conceived of Hexcana as a Gnostica variant, but adding two new directions seemed too likely to tip the perfect balance of the game. Whereas tossing new cray-cray into Zarcana seemed more in the spirit of the game. Thus, Hexcana is Zarcana played on a hex grid. All rules are the same, except that there are six orthogonal directions, and the opening layout should consist of seven round Tarot cards in a hex formation.
Playtesting will have to wait for the acquisition of a round Tarot deck and a live Zarcana victim partner.
Since my last gaming post, but still a few months ago, I also added Jacynth City (yet another Zark City variant) to my Decktet and pyramid games lists. Today I am also posting the draft rules of Darcana, a reimplementation of Dectana with more Gnostica, less Zarcana, and a solo/automata mode.
