“Those sound like more complicated silhouettes than the suits I’m used to: tiles, candles, fans, cups.”

Griffie gets a deck of cards out. “I actually decided to get a fairly fancy deck because the trappings of civilization can be remarkably useful in diplomacy … right, not talking about work. Anyway.”

Ey shows Lenora the cards. They form a 52-card deck, with numbered cards 1 through 10 and face cards being the Page, the Knight, and the Lord. The numbered cards feature, not just stamped silhouettes, but artful drawings of the appropriate quantities of the relevant items, with patterned tiles and fans in multiple styles. The face cards feature creatures of Earth, Fire, Air, and Water (with tiles, candles, fans, and cups as appropriate, for clarity), with the Pages being small humanoid creatures with bat wings and horns, the Knights being relatively featureless but combat-ready looking blobs of an element with crude 'arms', and the Lords being noble- and humanoid-looking genies.

"Huh, we do two-ten-jack-queen-king-ace. Those are some nice looking monsters. Well, probably they're people actually."

"I think there are some games that treat the singletons of each suit as a bigger deal than the lords but not all of them? And … yeah, all of these are people, but these," ey points at the horned figures "are the type of people who aren't that bright and are also more interested in hanging out in a cave-or-such and occasionally harassing travelers than, say, interacting with society, and these" ey points at the blobs "are … well, being much smarter than the usual sort of Air doesn't make your behavior all that different from Air if you have the same goals, though you might be more purposeful about insisting on keeping a particular entity in your whirlwind, but usually they're either acting kind of like unintelligent materials or being bossed around by someone else. …often one of these," ey says, pointing at the genies.

"Regrettably, most of the things that threaten locomotives tend to be pretty smart. Aside from fungus and infested wrecks of previous locomotives, I can think of... Cantankeri and Chorister Bees both aren't that bright, sort of like your, uh, blobs, I think. Or actually, there's a few nasties in the Blue Kingdom and Eleutheria - Shutting up now, sorry."

"Anyway, I got out this deck to discuss card suits, but the game I was originally thinking of uses a special deck doesn't really have suits at all, though the cards do mostly divide into New Rule, Action, Keeper, and Goal cards."

"Sure, I've seen a few barcard games like that. They printed stylized weapons and soldiers and monsters and even warships in the back of books and had a weird set of rules for building a deck and fighting 'em. It was neat. Something like that?"

"The goal of this one is to meet some arbitrary criteria printed on a Goal card, often having a specific pair of Keepers in play, it's less conflict-y. Here, there's an intro version."

Griffie gets a box with cards and a rulebook from Bar. The box features an ant, a ladybug, a round red candy, a chocolate chip, and a thin black rectangular prism with numerous silvery 'legs' extending from the sides and text reading 'CPU' on the top.

"So, by default, you draw one card and play one card. The New Rule cards can alter that, or mess with how many cards you can have in your hand. In the bigger game, there are more types of New Rules. Actions let you do special one-time actions, and Keepers and Goals seem fairly self-explanatory. This game only has five Keepers, and each possible goal involves a specific pairing. …the 'computer chip' is a piece of a really fancy machine for doing math, I actually bought one of those myself, really expensive but very, very useful."

Griffie shuffles the deck and deals 3 cards to emself and Lenora.