They were ordered by our senior engineer, who is also a partner in the company, and their arrival was a surprise to me. Unfortunately he went a bit overboard when ordering.. considering that there’s enough cards in a deck for four developers to use, he’s ordered us enough for a hundred and twenty people.

I put it down to sheer old-fashioned optimism. If pressed we could line up about twenty people with a ‘developer’ label on them, if we scoured every office in our company and stuck a few mannequins between them.

So I am illegally going to give a few packets away to readers of the blog. Contact me on Skype (jacob.ozolins) if you are interested (I’ll edit this post to remove this sentence when there’s none left).

You can order your own too, if you want: http://store.mountaingoatsoftware.com/products/planning-poker-cards

Each deck contains enough cards for four estimators to each hold cards with the following values: ?, 0, ½, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100, and ∞. The cards are printed on the finest quality card stock available. Each deck comes in a box to help keep the cards from being damaged.

We’ve been using laser printed pieces of paper in the past, which are now frayed and yellowing. These cards make the developer feel at least a little more ’serious’…