So I’ve got this awesome Fallen London card deck, Apocyan edition as a wedding gift from my spouse, both in FL and irl. The deck is a work of art! It is very pleasing to look at and to hold, and I would like to actually use it. Playing just regular card games feels kind of an understatement, you know, like in that saying, something about aggressively applying a Neathoscope to malicious ushabtiu…
I’m wondering – is there knowledge or speculations about card games in the Neath? What games do people play and how, exactly?
How much do we know about the rules of the Marvellous? Has anyone tried to collect and systematize available information? Does the Marvellous deck even look like this? It does use rats, cats, bats, and hats after all.
I’m especially curious to hear from the other deck owners. Have you made use of the cards? Are you overexcited about it, like I am? 
I’ve used it for games of cribbage, but the colours and suits don’t pop as well as a standard deck so it’s only sparingly invoked to (lovingly) antagonize family members.
I think it’s been intentionally left incomplete to add to the prestige of our characters learning to play it and play it well. One could make a playable version for fun, in the same way one could make Zzoup with less esoteric substitutes for hanged men’s tears and Exile’s Rose, but it wouldn’t be quite so, well, Marvellous.
Since the structure is similar to poker (betting and raising on a series of hands), all that would be required would be to collect and fill in the valid hands and their ranking. I got the impression that it wasn’t a strict hierarchy but a kind of rock-paper-scissors comparison which adds to the complexity of it.
Slightly off-topic, but I feel I must mention that someone has actually made human-edible Zzoup: We cooked Zzoup from Sunless Sea - YouTube
Yeah, as Phryne mentioned, I started a thread to try and decipher the rules of the Marvellous at one point.
Phryne did an excellent job compiling known hands, and myself and others sorta tried to work out the game behind it. We got… sorta somewhere? Then life came up, and I got frustrated trying to decipher something with just too little information. I never followed up on the lead at the end of that thread, to look at the official Discord, so if you want to do so and reopen that thread please go ahead.
There’s actually an off handed mention of an Urchin card game in the Upper River called Spite Mr. Blemmigan. If it’s a reference to the Discworld game Cripple Mr. Onion, then you can actually play it! You’d just need a regular deck of cards as well.
The rules of the game can be found here:
Just don’t forget, the real rules of Spite Mr. Blemmigan are whatever you can make your opponents believe the rules of Spite Mr. Blemmigan are!