GOITA (new card project)

My family is a frequent backer on Kickstarter, having helped fund many playing cards decks and a few games. A recent backing (Junior Hanafuda) got me thinking about more Asian-style playing cards. We have a Hanafuda deck I picked up a Korean grocery once, and I started thinking about adapting parts of the Bagua deck to Hanafuda. While that concept got shelved, I started looking at other Asian card games.

One of them I came across is called Goita or ごいた. A traditional Japanese game normally played with small wooden tiles, it gave me some ideas. As seen with Bagua, I’m not against non-standard card sizes. I found that a few card producers offer small card sizes, which meshed well with the traditional tile sizes.

I started the project with an eye for traditional motifs, but decided to go a little more modern. I also wanted to blend the Japanese characters and their English names. Instead of adding actual English, I went chess icons to match, as Goita tokens use the same symbols as Japanese chess or Shogi (将棋).

At the moment, this is a tinkering project to stretch some skills. I’ve toyed around with getting plastic cards made, as I think they would hold up better as small cards.