by sdonohue

100 Parks for a Fantasy City is a 2026 release from Azukail Games. It was written by Adrian Kennelly and illustrated by Bob Greyvenstein and Zsuzsa Fige.

Presentation
This is available as a 12 page pdf in standard letter size. The cover is in color as are the interior pages. There's a cover, a copyright page and most of a page of advertisements at the end, leaving about 9 pages of content. The content is in a standard two-column layout and is somewhat lacking in white-space.

Content
This is a list of 100 creative ideas for parks. It is laid out primarily as 100 numbered entries, typically a single paragraph. The supplement contains no game rules and is intended for use with most fantasy games.

A couple of typical entries include:
"Most of the park consists of a large lake, with some grassland and trees dotted around it. The lake is used for various water activities, and rowboats can be rented from a small dock for people to go out on the lake. Various waterbirds visit the lake, though they mostly remain at one end, where neither they nor the users will disturb each other."

"A constant babble can be heard coming from within the walls of this small, walled park. When entered, the source of the babble can easily be determined; the plants are all talking to each other. No-one is exactly sure just how intelligent the plants are, but any attempt to do something like remove a flower results in screams and the other plants all shouting for help and accusing the one doing so of being a murderer."

Evaluation
This is a clever idea for a supplement. I've been in very few cities or settlements that had a park of any sort and it seems to me now like that's probably an oversight. My own small town has more than 20 parks of various sizes and all the surrounding communities have their own parks too. It makes sense that there should be parks even in large fantasy settlements and this product provides a number of creative ideas for parks.

Some of the parks are just simple parks with some statues or maybe a water feature, but quite a few have a potential adventure hook included. Since it's a generic supplement, the GM will have to do work to develop them, but it's still a nice idea and a good source for inspiration. Most of the parks could also be used for other genres

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by Monica Elida Forssell

Who among us played 52 Pick Up as kids? It was not very fun to be on the business end of that, to be sure. Especially if the one who spread the cards went a bit wild. Oh, and we also used to slap each other on the knuckles with a deck of cards, just for fun. Of course we did use them for the regular means, playing card games of different sorts. Even solitaire, what we call "Kabal". Once I started to get really into games again as a young adult I thought I would never see any use of a regular 52 deck of cards ever again. How mistaken I was. However it`s not all by accident or chance that I suddenly got my first deck of cards in about half my life. It was for my love of anime, in particular Free Iwatobi, where my avatar is one of the characters.

As for my Free Iwatobi deck of cards, I got that off ebay. Once I got it I was kind of like "Well, now what am I supposed to do with it?!" One of the solitaires I quite enjoyed as a kid was Clock Solitaire. I recall many a day sitting on the floor of the room playing the game with an ever more worn deck of cards, trying to align the cards correctly to land of the numbers of the clock. It`s not by any means the most challenging or thought provoking solitaire game in existance, but it is a nice little past time activity. And I have lots of memories of having fun with it. This deck of cards gives an added eye candy that I was not thinking of with the old traditional decks of cards I used to play. It might not be a deck of cards you can bring out in any occasion there is, but it`s still a nice one to have in my collection. As for the solitaire version, it`s fun, but I quite understand why it has such low rating score on BGG. Like with so many other games I played as a kid, it was very fun back then. Now it`s just OK, or rather meh, just a five minute activity. And it took a long time before I started to branch out with the decks of cards, because, yet again, I saw no need for them in my collection. That one deck of cards was a gimmick, a fun little nod to a franchise I was very much into.

As a swimmer I started thinking of having a water proof deck of cards. I found one, bought it, and I have never in my life felt the need to bring the deck of cards to the pool side. When I have down time by the pool it`s because I wait for my time to swim at competitions. Yet, it`s good to know I have the chance of it, if I want to. And it`s another deck of cards to play around in, both with regular solitaire games, and with RPG. More on that later. There was a time when I needed all the nice dice sets I could get my hands on, or I wanted some good cloth bags with custom art. Even a clunky pile of metal coins to change out the cardboard coins in certain games of mine. I have accummulated a lot of such generic accessories over the years, so much so that I feel I am running out of space for them, and means to use them. In recent years I have seen a slight shift. There are many dice campaigns going on still. At least a few campaigns each year feature generic sets of metal coins or fancy bags, too. But something that has caught my eyes more have been more campaigns for decks of cards. Maybe they have been there already, for many years. I just haven`t realized it. And the thing with crowdfunding pages is that they pick up on what you are interested in. "You bought this dinosaur deck of cards, look at these beauties!" True, I fall quite easily for some good art. But in doing so I should probably also get ready to play more of of those old solitaire games. Like this, Pyramid. I played it as a kid, layed it behind, and as I got a Steam account I found the game as sessions to unlock and going on adventures. But in all fairness it`s quite nice to sit and dabble with it on the table, too, sometimes. I was not aware of how much I still like to try to solve this kind of solitaire before I had a need to try it out.

As for the other traditional solitaire games, they are often featured as games on computers. Everyone who have played it on a computer will recall how the cards fall down in cascades after you finish with a win. Quite satisfying. It kind of feels like a good accomplishment to see the cards cascade. The usual suspects for a good play of a regular deck of cards for solitaire are Freecell and Patience. These are also the two solitaires that are known to me as "Kabal". Don`t ask me of the origin of that word and what it means, but it`s also a word we use about solving other aspects of our lives. Like "getting the kids to school, make dinner and then drive them to their different after school activities, we can`t solve the Kabal." It`s quite interesting how a game term has leaked into the every day speach. While the good old solitaires are probably not as popular anymore, they are quite hard to solve. With luck you could solve it once in a while, but then there would be lots of unsolved ones inbetween.

Once I had started to buy different decks of cards I seem to not be able to quite calm down. In just the last year I have gotten hold of three decks of cards, the dinosaur deck, one with my star sign, one with Ancient Egypt, and I am currenly waiting for one with dragons in them. I know there is a time when I should stop. The same thing has been with dice in particular. True, I can use the d6 in many of my PNP, but the RPG dice are rarely used. I don`t want to collect a bunch of decks of cards because they are cute, only for them to lie idle. There need to be more uses for a regular deck of cards than just the old solitaire games. I have seen games coming up that are built around a regular deck of cards in one way or another. Some, especially PNP games, are only in need of a generic one, while others you need to buy the special decks of cards for certain reasons. And also it has started to trickle into some board game/RPG crossovers. One of these is Quest Calendar: Leaf Riders of Wrenwood. I have of yet to use the deck of cards in the game, but at least I got hold of it once I backed for the game.

Cue my time with RPG games. Some are in need of good decks of cards to play. I am still very much in the beginning of that phase, and far from an expert in holding solo RPG sessions on a regular basis. When I see an RPG game offers a custom deck of cards I am totally on board, though. That is a way to theme the whole session through and through. It sounds a bit weird if I should start a session with critters, and it sports half naked anime characters on the cards. I say so, because I recently got around to playing an RPG I have had in my collection for a while. It`s called Tea and Toadstools. As I backed for another RPG from the same designer I added on a few extra. The deck of cards aren`t themed through and through. The art is on the back, and on the ace where the critter`s home is and the jokers. That was a tiny bit of a letdown. I have found a joy in Journal RPG in particular. They offer a way for me to manipulate cards instead of dice. Especially since dice hate me... This RPG in particular offered a new way of flipping up cards. For those I have dabbled with so far I have just turned over a card and then followed the prompt. For this game I had to make a "world" for me to move around in. That was quite a new way for me to use a deck of cards. To be honest that sparked me to pick up on the backlog of RPGs I have strewn around. And I am for sure going to revisit this one. Since I started to look into RPG games I also saw the need to have some assortment of different decks to use. For a critter deck I can`t come with an Egyptian mummy on the cards. As for a dark and gloomy RPG I should probably not use the dinosaur deck.

It is my hope with starting a new collection of decks of cards I can also start to branch out and find new ways to use them. I want to see other games, even if it is new ways of playing solitaire, a whole new game that has me use a deck of cards as the "world", as it were, an RPG that prompts me through the cards of what will happen next, or the outcome of certain actions I take. In all reality it`s good that a regular deck of cards will not be some forgotten toy. As with other types of games they get reinvented, and given a new life. For me I was so hung up on the fact that I only could use a deck of cards for the old solitaires. I needed more experience in the gaming world to realize that was a wrongful assumption. To give even the oldest games new life could bring new attention to them. We have seen it with other games picked up from ancient times. Now I don`t believe a regular deck of cards is from an ancient time. Only one of the traditional solitaires I played for this blog post has a registered year. Even that one may be a bit of an asterix. We can`t for sure know how far back these regular decks of cards go. We can assume. But it is fun to see the old deck of cards I remember from childhood get a new life, through art, quality, usefulness. I believe a regular deck of cards is here to stay in one form or another. It was one of the first things I came across as a kid. In recent years I have seen them in a new light. And still I feel the remnants of the sense of holding a deck of cards in my hands as a kid. I mean, it was just a regular 52 deck of cards that taught me how to riffle shuffle. I do that to this day...

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