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what would be a good set of four suits for a toki pona deck of cards? #TokiPona
toki pona playing cards, our preliminary thinking about suits
I think for space reasons we'd want each suit to be one word - I'm imagining a naming scheme like "luka tu wan palisa", plus we have to repeat the suit symbol up to ten times in the card's design anyway.
So, looking at Wikipedia's suits page [en.m.wikipedia.org], we have:
- clubs/acorns
- cups/shields/hearts
- swords/roses/leaves/pikes/spades
- coins/bells/diamonds
I think 1=palisa is clearest, but maybe 2=poki, 3=utala, and 4=mani? Using poki instead of pilin is a little weird for us as US Americans but I don't hate it, and all of these are compromises anyway.
toki pona playing card suits, scribble
palisa, poki, utala, and mani are pretty visually distinct, too
@picklish@weirder.earthtoki pona playing card suit thoughts
some blabbing brainstorming from me
Requirements to me: need to have a symbol that is simple and easily differentiable by outline. I think that rules out kule, anything too abstract, and things like waso/soweli are too complicated of an outline.
If I were brainstorming new suits instead of matches for existing suits, I'd probably suggest elements? They have good shapes and are easily recognizable, e.g.
mun / suno / kon
soko / kili / kasi / nena / kiwen
telo
seli
lete
Critiquing this thought: 
/
/
are very close in shape, unfortunately. Similarly / 
are similar when reversed like they are on playing cards.
Maybe 
or 
could be the fire element, but those conflict a bit visually with 
.
That leaves me with these four (one of which I'm indecisive about):
suno:
kon: 
telo:
soko/kili/kasi:
/ 
/ 
If the symbols were sitelen pona rather than icons, then kon/telo are too similar and I'd probably switch in lete for one of them.
re: toki pona playing card suit thoughts
@picklish we really like thinking about distinct shapes and outlines and stuff! we did kind of assume unconsciously that the symbols would be sitelen pona but there's no reason to assume that.
and we like your four/six/seven choices! soko is so cool but we are cowards about choosing non-pu words so we would probably end up with kasi, which is also wonderful. and lete, although I'm not sure which of telo or kon we'd replace. thanks for thoughts!
?@malokan we hadn't considered colors, but those are a classic suits option - we might go with pimeja over walo for convenience of printed playing cards
@RussSharek ni li pona, ni li pona
@Packbat
akesi en kala en pipi en waso
