The Stroop Effect Pack

The Stroop effect is a psychological phenomenon whereby a person is liable to misread, or at least be slowed down in their reading, by a colour word written in a different hue. So BLUE and RED and GREEN will be misread, or at the very least cause confusion. You can read more about the Stroop Effect here.

We thought it would be a useful tool to employ to give an expert card player an in-game handicap, without requiring any adjustment to the rules.

Here are the four Aces:

Ace of red Clubs, black Diamonds, black Hearts, and red Spades

And here are the Queens with their livery reversed:

The Queens of red Clubs, black Diamonds, black Hearts, and red Spades

Obviously, any card game can be played with them, but it provides a welcome note of unfamiliarity to any well-worn game. Here is the full set:

The full set of Stroop effect cards

You can buy a Stroop Effect pack printed on demand at Make Playing Cards here,

The Hyperstroop Deck

We decided that a conventional pattern produces what we call a Proust Effect — it slows down the memorious through over‑recognition. So we combined both sets into an utterly confusing deck we call the Hyperstroop deck.

You can buy a Hyperstroop pack, printed on demand, at Make Playing Cards here.

Gallery Packs

To compound the confusion, we have also used all four black suits to make a gallery pack from Holbein's Dance of Death prints, and the four red suits for a gallery pack of his illustrations to Erasmus' Praise of Folly. You can read about them here and here.

The Snark Pack

Finally, we have used the red Hearts, Diamonds, and Clubs as the suits for our Snark game — an adaptation of Carroll’s Court Circular for three suits, illustrated with Henry Holiday’s designs. You can read more about this here (Just the place for a Snark).