The Vault Opens: Three Tall Tales Decks Never Made It to Print, Until Now

This series has spent its first few weeks on the almosts. Tall Tales almost ended up in Starbucks. It almost got a custom edition at Cracker Barrel. I pitched it to 70 retailers, most of them now out of business. What I haven’t talked about is what I made for those almosts — the cards I wrote for editions that never went to print. They’ve been sitting in spreadsheets for twenty-three years. Today they go online.

There were three unreleased decks.

The Discovery Edition, about 35 cards, was the nature-leaning expansion: cryptids, weird-but-true biology, lost-explorer lore. It’s the deck I had the most fun writing, and the one I’d bring back first.

The Hollywood Edition, about 33 cards, was pop culture and movie trivia. It sat closest to the original Pocket Edition in voice, which would have made it the safe next release.

The Down Home Edition, about 60 cards, was the Cracker Barrel pitch — folksy, Americana, regional, the most divergent of the three.

“Designed but never shipped” can sound like a polite way to say “a few notes in a drawer.” These weren’t that. They were finished cards — written, answered, fact-checked, formatted, color-coded by edition — that simply never met a printing press. They lived in a handful of master spreadsheets, and every row was colored by its fate. Blue meant it shipped in the Pocket Edition. Green was Discovery, brown was Hollywood, red was Down Home. For twenty-three years those cells sat in their colors, complete and unread. Well, mostly complete: some rows trail off into empty columns, a question written and its answers never filled in — cards caught mid-thought when the whole effort stopped.

Without a plan to relaunch a card game to put them back in the world, I decided to give them a new life directly on the web. I built a card viewer: every card gets its own page and its own URL, with the unreleased cards stamped Never Printed. No box, no rulebook, no reprint, no Kickstarter to run. Just the cards, readable and free to anyone curious enough to look.

I wanted each card individually indexed: a page holding a small piece of content that didn’t exist on the web before — a fact, a question, a strange little story with its own address. People searching for the kind of trivia these cards are made of can now land on them, and every one of those pages points quietly back to the original 2003 Pocket Edition, still for sale while supplies last, and to a “let me know if Tall Tales ever comes back” list for anyone who wants more than the few hundred boxes I have left. I’m not hiding the funnel. I’m just not going to dress it up as more than it is.

Two ways in, if you want them:

• Browse the decks, sorted by edition, Never-Printed cards included.
• Draw a random card — shuffling, basically, except every draw is a shareable link.

What this isn’t: a comeback announcement. Whether any of these three decks ever gets manufactured is a decision for later. I’ll let engagement decide. If the web version finds an audience and the notify list fills up, that tells me something. If it doesn’t, that tells me something else, and the cards still get to exist either way.

There was a fifth color in the spreadsheets, too: pale yellow, for base-game material that didn’t make the original Pocket Edition cut. All five collections sat untouched together — a finished game, three finished expansions, and a pile of extras, visible only to me. As of today, four of those colors are online. The yellow stays in the file for now; if the rest proves out, it becomes the pool I’d draw a refresh from.

Three decks that never got printed, printed at last — just not on cardstock.

The remaining copies of Tall Tales Pocket Edition are here.