Vines and Postas

Vines is a suite of more than 20 original trick-taking games with a five-suited deck.

Postas is an “older” version of the same deck, used for a different family of games. The decks are sort of interchangeable, being 55-card five-suited decks, but each is better matched to its own set of games.

You can buy Vines and Postas from DriveThruCards, or print your own decks using the files below.

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Vines

Vines is a suite of more than twenty original games and variants played with a unique 5-suited deck. This suite of games was more than five years in the making, and we are thrilled to bring you the first deck with custom artwork!

The Vines deck has 55 cards in five suits, with artwork by Cheyenne Wright, including the usual meticulous attention to detail and unnecessary backstory that you have come to expect from us.

Buy the Decks: You can print your own deck using the files below, or order a high-quality printed deck from our friends at DriveThruCards.

Printing Files and Links:

The first rules document below is complete, including all the Vines games and variations, as well as additional information about trick-taking games in general, and notes on the history of the deck. Below that listing are several sections of the same document, to help you easily find the games you’re looking for, or when you’re just popping in for a rules question on your phone.

  • Vines Deck, Print-and-Play (PDF)

  • Vines Rules, Complete Game List with core rules, history and notes, Version 1.3.3 (6/25/22)

    • Game Block 1, Coralon and Thief (3-6p cutthroat games and 4p partners game)

    • Game Block 2, Ducks and Geese (4p partners game, including several variants)

    • Game Block 3, Bishop and Baronet, (4-5p partners game and its gambling variant)

    • Game Block 4, Chevalier (4p partners game with poison cards)

    • Game Block 5, Up and Down (5p ad-hoc partners game with divided tricks)

  • Vines Coloring Pages 20 pages of Vines art in print-and-color form.

A note about the card sheets: Vines has 55 cards, which is just one more than a multiple of nine. So the Deuce of Locks is found in the middle of page 1, which also serves as a cutting guide. Don’t forget to keep that card when you cut away the rest!

Videos:

Other Games with the Vines Deck:

Gin Rummy: We’ve discovered that the Vines Deck is actually pretty great for Gin Rummy. So great, in fact, that you don’t need any changes to the rules. Whatever your preferred version of Gin Rummy, give it a shot with the five-suited deck. You’ll find that you can go gin with two five-card sets, which we actually think is an improvement over the standard poker deck!

Poker: We don’t have anything to add to the thousands of poker variants that already exist, at least not yet. If you want to play poker with the Vines deck, remember that five of a kind is still the best hand (and is now actually possible, unlike in real poker) and that a flush is now so hard that it outranks four of a kind.

If you want a betting and bluffing game similar to poker, try Holdout for the Postas Deck, below. It can also be played with the Vines deck.

The Postas Deck

Before the modern Vines deck, there was the Postas Deck, developed for the game of Prima Carta.

This deck also contains five suits of eleven cards, so it is functionally identical to the Vines deck, but much simpler in form.

The Postas Deck has just the numbers 1 through 10, and an optional eleventh rank marked with an E.

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According to the fiction, the Postas deck predates the Vines deck by at least 40 years. The truth is that we developed it about five years after the original.

You can play all the Vines games with this deck, but it was designed for a new family of games beginning with Prima Carta. The Postas deck is named after another game, which is commonly called Holdout but is also known as Postes de Cerca (fence posts).

The “Games” document below contains detailed rules for two games, Prima Carta and Holdout, as well as additional information about the history of the deck, and how to use it for all the games in Vines.

Buy the Decks: You can print your own deck using the files below, or order a high-quality printed deck from our friends at DriveThruCards.

Printing Files and Links:

  • Postas Games: (Prima Carta and Holdout, plus history and notes) Version 1.1, 6/25/22

  • Lobo Rules, Solitaire game, Version 1.1, 8/13/22

  • Postas Deck, Print-and-Play (PDF)

A note about the card sheets: Postas has 55 cards, which is just one more than a multiple of nine. So the Ace of Locks is found in the middle of page 1, which also serves as a cutting guide. Don’t forget to keep that card when you throw away the rest of that page!

About the Games:

Prima Carta (literally, “first card”) is a traditional gambling game from the Sieran Penninsula. Players bet on which suits will finish first, as a dealer processes the deck through several passes. This rules doc also contains a lot of history, related to the story Ten Cards Up, which can be found at our Library. You will also find hints for playing your favorite Vines games with the Postas deck.

Holdout is a strategy gambling game using the Postas deck, a game that fills the same niche as poker, but in an alternate world.

Lobo is a solitaire game for the Postas deck. The challenge of Lobo is to defeat your opponent (“The Wolf”) by playing your cards in a way that empties their hand. The game requires good planning and a little bit of luck.

More games with the Postas deck are coming soon. We’re also working on new custom artwork for the Postas deck, but those cards are still a few months away, at best.

Read the Fiction!

You can find Ten Cards Up, a novella about Prima Carta, at the Library. Please let us know if you like it, and look for more game-related fiction from James Ernest soon!

Where did Vines come from? Like many games by James Ernest, Vines began as a freelance project for a publisher who didn’t buy it. Over the years, the game built a small following of players and testers who still wish they could play, This version is set in Carrisor, complete with a broad and completely unnecessary backstory, as is our wont.

What is Carrisor? It’s one of the many fantasy worlds that James Ernest keeps simmering in the background. The Carrisor pages at World Anvil haven’t yet been updated with the characters from Vines, but you can check out what’s already there. And we have a little extra backstory here as well, at the Crab Fragment Library:

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Bidder’s Cubes

A bidder’s cube, made from the 12mm icons on the label sheet below.

Since the early days of real-world Vines development, dedicated players have carried these cute little accessories called… well, we didn’t have a name for them. We hope someday to find a name that sticks, and despite the delectable double-entendre of “trump die” we prefer to call them “bidder’s cubes.” Perhaps this will someday evolve into “scube” or “dirk” or “chub” but we’re not holding our breath. In the rules we call ‘em “sokis,” so we’ll see if that sticks.

The label artwork above is a JPG with various sizes of the suit images. You can experiment with this art, print it on a full-sheet label, cut it up, and stick it to your own 6-sided die, like we did for the photo above. Also on the label sheet are other things that you might want to print on a label, including various Vines logo art. Use them to decorate a laptop, sticker your briefcase, or make a box for your hand-made cards.