Last week I wanted to play Crazy Eights with my son. But we couldn’t find a pack of cards. It turned out that my daughter had used one for her hobby projects. She especially likes to craft steam-punk clothing and hats lately. Painting playing cards and sticking them on a hat is what she does. So, no cards. But, wait a minute, I thought, I must have some cards in some of the collector’s editions of pc games.

The first candidates that came to mind were The Witcher games. The Witcher 2 and 3 are the biggest game boxes I have in my collection. And sure enough, a pack soon was found. We could play.

Then later I started wondering what other games had a pack of playing cards. There were two other games: Wasteland 2 and Divinity: Origin Sin. Other collector’s editions like Baldur’s Gate II, Neverwinter Nights 1 or 2, Torment: Tides of Numenera, Fallout: New Vegas or Beyond a Steel Sky didn’t have them. Some games have physical versions of in-game card games, like Gwent from The Witcher 3, but that’s it.

Two of the three packs were still sealed. And is was once again very satisfying to rip those plastics off. I got all those games (except Beyond a Steel Sky) second-hand, so I didn’t get the opportunity to properly unbox them by ripping the plastics off. This way, I got at least some satisfaction. A couple of days later I got a random pack and quickly replaced The Witcher in it’s box.