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Lazy Dog, 2012, playing card deck, 54 poker-size cards, edition of 30, available via Autumn Space.

lazydog


Lazy Dog
is an alphabet deck made up of letters and homophones of letters, plus palindromes, photos of rocks and props, and drawings. It can be used in most French-suited playing card games or in anagram-type word play games.

The use of letters, homophones, visual inconsistencies (within and without "suit"), doubles, hides, and pocket variations (inside and outside pockets) challenges players' cognition and implicit memory. The deck's two-faced nature simultaneously encourages confusion and clarity, concealing and revealing, and honesty and trickery. Also embedded in the deck are other shady, but to be honest, inherent aspects of the game like card counting, bluffing, misdirection, memorization ("learning the deck"), and the ol' switcheroo.

Lazy Dog is named simultaneously after the classic fox and dog pangram* and my dog Box Fan (aka Rocksanne). Similar in origin to Lazy Dog, the game is also known as Black Head Pet (which is also an anagram of Alphabet Deck).

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* The full pangram is: The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog. This one is related, though less directly evident: Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.