The Wonderglass Pack: Playing Cards with Asymmetrical Color Relationships
- Newt
- Apr 19
- 4 min read
The Wonderglass Pack is a specialized set of playing cards featuring an asymmetrical color-passing system that creates unique gameplay opportunities. Unlike conventional playing cards with their straightforward red and black suits, these cards incorporate a directed flow of colors that can only be followed in one direction, much like the logical puzzles in Lewis Carroll's works.
Card Structure and Design
The deck consists of 52 cards in four suits, with each card divided vertically into two colors:
Castle Suit (replacing clubs): Left half Red, Right half Black
Queen Suit (replacing diamonds): Left half Black, Right half Green
Knight Suit (replacing hearts): Left half Green, Right half Gold
King Suit (replacing spades): Left half Gold, Right half Red
This creates a circular relationship where colors pass in a specific sequence: Castle → Queen → Knight → King → Castle. The right side color of one card connects to the left side color of the next suit in the sequence (Black → Black, Green → Green, Gold → Gold, Red → Red).
The court cards feature silhouettes traced from John Tenniel's original illustrations for Lewis Carroll's "Alice" books, preserving the connection to Carroll's imaginative world.
Here is the full set
Special Jokers
The deck includes two Mad Hatter jokers that serve a unique function:
Joker 1: Left Green, Right Red - Creates a bridge between Knight and Castle suits
Joker 2: Left Black, Right Gold - Creates a bridge between Castle and King suits
These "castling" jokers (a chess reference) allow players to break the established color cycle in specific ways, adding strategic depth to games played with the deck.
Gameplay Implications
The defining feature of the Wonderglass Cards is that they can't simply be used as a standard deck. Their asymmetrical color relationships create gameplay where:
Cards can only follow each other in the prescribed direction (Castle → Queen → Knight → King → Castle)
This circular sequence cannot be reversed without special cards or rules
The jokers create strategic "shortcuts" that bypass portions of the normal sequence
This structure enables entirely new games that would be impossible to play with conventional cards, while also transforming familiar games into fresh experiences with additional strategic layers.
The Inspiration
The Wonderglass Cards draw inspiration from Lewis Carroll's approach to logic and language rather than simply using Alice imagery. As a mathematician and logician, Carroll constructed worlds with their own internal consistency – places where conventional rules were inverted or transformed rather than simply abandoned.
"What's the use of a pack of cards," thought I, "without peculiar combinations or conversations?" This question, a modest reworking of Alice's famous literary lament, started me down a rabbit hole of card design that led to the Wonderglass Cards.
While many Carroll-inspired products focus on the visual elements of Wonderland, these cards incorporate the underlying mathematical playfulness and logical inversions that make his work enduringly fascinating. The name "Wonderglass" references both "Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass," capturing how these cards function as a transformative lens on conventional card games.
Asymmetrical Logic
The asymmetrical color passing represents the "looking-glass logic" that pervades Carroll's work. In the Looking-Glass world, Alice discovers that running helps you stay in the same place, and walking away from something brings you toward it. Similarly, these cards operate on a one-way principle – attempting to reverse their relationships creates nonsensical combinations, just as trying to apply conventional logic in Wonderland leads to confusion.
As the White Queen tells Alice, "Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." The Wonderglass Cards invite players to embrace their own impossible thing: a deck where relationships work in only one direction, creating new possibilities through constraint.
Chess Not Cards
Though physically taking the form of playing cards, the Wonderglass deck draws more inspiration from the chess imagery of "Through the Looking-Glass" than the playing-card courtiers of "Wonderland." The suits are named after chess pieces (Castle/Rook, Knight, Queen, and King), reflecting Carroll's fascination with chess as a system of movement governed by specific rules.
This chess connection extends to the "castling" jokers – a nod to the special chess move where king and rook change positions. Just as castling creates an exception to standard chess piece movement, these jokers create exceptions to the standard color-passing sequence.
Games for the Wonderglass Cards
Several games have been designed specifically for these cards, including:
Looking-Glass Comet: A shedding game where players must follow either the color cycle or rank sequence
Cascades: is a melding game designed exclusively for Wonderglass Cards.
Solitaire Cascades: A patience game adapting Napoleon's Tomb with color-passing mechanics
Each of these games would be impossible to play with a conventional deck, as they rely on the specific color relationships of the Wonderglass Cards.
Conventional Games Transformed
The Wonderglass Cards can also transform familiar games with new constraints:
Looking-Glass Court Circular: An adaptation of Lewis Carroll's own card game with added color constraints.
Tout-Atout Bridge: a Bridge variant with rotating trumps, adapted for Wonderglass.
In Rummy, matching sets must follow the color-passing rule, turning "three of a kind" into a circular path through the suits
Poker hands take on new dimensions when flushes must follow the color cycle
Even simple matching games become puzzles of directional relationships. Try Klondike for Wonderglass:
Much like Carroll's wordplay transformed familiar language into something strange yet consistent, these cards transform familiar games by adding a layer of directional logic.
The Wonderglass Pack is available for purchase here. Rules for several specially designed games are included with each deck.
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