March 15

My Nuclear War deck

A short while ago I took ownership of the Nuclear War Players Guide and I thought it would be interesting to see what the breakdown of my current playing deck is; after sorting through all the cards and counting them twice I present to you my findings:

Total number of cards 580 Percentage
Delivery Systems 140 24%
Warheads 194 34%
Propaganda 112 19%
Secrets 37 6%
Specials 97 17%

Nuclear war chart

It has been a while since I did this and my results even surprised me.  I never realised I had that many special cards or warheads in the deck and I even added the special dual warhead / booster cards that came in the expansion Weapons of Mass Destruction, I added them in as as both warhead and booster.

With such a large deck I had to find a way of transporting it around and I have a large Utra-pro card carrier to house them plus it also doubles as a way of drawing cards; rather than have one or two piles of cards I allow each player to draw from any of the five wells in the carrier.  It makes shuffling them back easy to, just shuffle and deal to the bottom of each well then lay the unused stacks on top.

Secrets are handled by letting someone have the chance of stealing a Secret and then they take a card from a separate Secret deck; the stolen card is then returned to the deck for another time.  This way nobody knows until it is played what Secret has been taken.

Specials also include the various anti-missiles in the game, I didn’t think it would be worth counting them all out for another separate list.

When it comes to playing the game, I let each player draw two cards and choose one rather than dealing nine cards out to everyone.

If you want to know the specific breakdown of the deck let me know and I’ll see what I can do.