Shuffling With Dice

I feel like I might have shared this tip before, but I'm not finding it on the Daily Illuminator archives, so hopefully it's new to you.

I play a lot of games that use small decks of "shuffled" cards. I put "shuffled" in quotes because mixing up a small number of cards is actually really hard for me to do. One issue I have – which may be entirely a psychological one – is that I feel like I know where the cards are . . . or, at least, I suspect. I've had many games where my enjoyment was hampered because I've tried to shuffle One Interesting Card into a pack of nine other cards, and too often, it seems to have ended up in a place that hampers my enjoyment: the very first card, or on the bottom.

I stress this could be all in my mind! If you're "shuffling" six cards, then there's a one in three chance it'll end up on the top or bottom. Yet in my experience, it feels like it happens more often than that. Similarly, as I'm shuffling, I can generally feel like I know where the Interesting Card is. I suspect this is amplified in games where the Interesting Card doesn't get used as much as the cards it's shuffled among . . . If five cards in a six-card set are used every single game and one of the cards is only used every so often, it wouldn't be surprising if that lesser-used card feels different. Regardless, it's still frustrating to have a game that takes a while to set up cut surprisingly short when the Interesting Card is the very first card you see.

I've addressed this at our table by using dice to randomize small decks. Here's how that works:

First, I give the deck a loose shuffle. I'm not trying to do a proper randomization so much as make me lose initial track of the Interesting Card.

Then I pull out my snazzy polyhedral dice to help me determine the order. For example, if I'm trying to dice-shuffle 12 cards, I grab dice to represent each position in the deck: two different 12-sided dice, two different 10-siders, two different eight-siders, a six-sider, another 10-sider, a four-sider, a different six-sider, and a 20-sider. Of course, the number of dice used is adjusted depending on how many cards I'm shuffling (one fewer die than the number of cards). 

I roll 'em and count from the top with my lightly shuffled pile:

First 12-sider: count down from the top. (If I rolled a nine, then the ninth card of the loosely shuffled pile is the first card of my shuffled pile . . . meaning it's on the bottom.

Second 12-sider: Same as the first (rerolling if I got a 12). That's now the second card of the new pile.

First 10-sider: Again, count down from the top whatever I rolled. That's the third card.

Second 10-sider: Count again (rerolling 0's) to get the fourth card.

And so on. The third 10-sider is used to generate a number 1-5 (1-2 = first card, 3-4 = second card, etc.). The 20-sider is just used to get a high-low result to pick one of the two last cards.

If you're rolling all at once, the important bit is to make sure you know which order the dice should be read. (From a practical standpoint, this method also taps out around 15 cards or so, but more cards than that and even my delicate digits can't detect which card is going where, so a normal shuffle works fine.)

Between the loose shuffling and the dice, I generally don't know what card is where once the dice settle, and it all feels a lot more fair and random. Since I'm rolling all the dice at once, it's not too much slower than shuffling the old-fashioned way.

Better yet, I've cut down the times the Interesting Card has been right on top of a five-card deck to about 20% . . .

-- Steven Marsh