Amazon offers playing cards with Persian characters
Independent Aggregator of Iran-related News/Events, Kodoom.com: Amazon is now offering high quality playing cards with themes from ancient Persian history.
The developer of this product, Mohammad, an Iranian American entrepreneur and one of the founders of Negareh Aufarin, established 2013 in Michigan, explains in a phone interview how he came up with the idea:
What inspired you to do this?
Mohammad: While watching a documentary about an English king I realized that he is the inspiration behind one of the four kings in a traditional deck of cards. That made me wish there was a deck with Persian kings. I searched the web to see if such a deck exists and found nothing. That inspired me to create a deck depicting Persian characters.
Not knowing anything about the game business, I reached out to my life-long friend Michael who happens to be an accomplished game inventor. To my delight, he liked the idea. We sought out a graphic designer and were lucky to find the extremely talented Ann who proved invaluable to the project.
Did you take into account real details and research of Persia's history when designing these cards?
Mohammad: My goal from the beginning was to create authentic drawings as much as possible. Every face card was to depict a historical character in the Achaemenid era. The historical record was consulted not just for depictions of characters, but also for the dresses, weapons, artifacts, jewelry, and background.
Some depictions are based on historical records. For example, the depictions of king Daryush, joker Homa, jack Javid, and jack AryoBarzan are based on Persepolis stone reliefs and depiction of Queen Atossa based on a bust in the ancient Iran museum. We started with these. Ann did a superb job bringing these to colorful life.
We used the historical record when we could, but for many characters there are no such records. These we had to imagine from scratch. I provided a lot of background material to give Ann a feel and she diligently went through them all. She would then create a number of black and white samples, I would critique, and we would go back and forth many times till we got something that matched the era and looked genuine. These took a long time and I often wondered if I am wearing Ann down. But she enthusiastically persevered. For me this project was always a labor of love; I did not know whether we make any money from this venture or not. Soon that became contagious. Michael and Ann worked as if this was a labor of love for them as well.
Even with the ones we had to imagine from scratch we tried very hard to incorporate all we know about the character. For example, king Artaxerxes is depicted with a bird of prey in hand due to his fondness for hunting and birds of prey.
These drawings seem to be of high quality and intricate design. Did it cost you extra to ensure of the high quality?
Mohammad: As we say on the acknowledgement card, utmost attention has been paid to every detail. It was our intention to create art that is entertaining, inspirational, and historically representative. We hope people enjoy using this deck as much as we enjoyed creating it.
How can people find more details or buy the cards?
Mohammad: The Persian deck was launched in late 2013. People can find more information and images on Persiandeck.com or buy the decks for themselves or Non Iranian friends on Amazon.com. Also, rating our products highly on Amazon will help us spread the word.
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