Deck of rice-sized playing cards certified as smallest ever made
A diminutive deck of playing cards has been certified as the smallest ever made.
Measuring 5 mm x 3.6 mm, each card is approximately the same size as a grain of rice.
They’re two times smaller than the previous record and 250 times smaller than standard playing cards.
London-based product designer and engineer Rob Hallifax challenged himself to create the world’s smallest pack of playing cards as a New Year’s resolution.
Despite having already successfully launched four other sets of playing cards on Kickstarter, Rob faced a variety of new difficulties this time around.
Regular card printers couldn’t print the exceptionally thin cards, so he got them made by a professional printer. They are made from silk stock, the same type – albeit a much thinner version – of the paper that most regular playing cards are made of.
Rob said the printing was “relatively straightforward”, but cutting the cards was much more difficult.
“Getting accurate cuts at such small sizes was a challenge,” he recalled.
“At that size, 1 mm is over a quarter of the width of the cards. If you were out by a similar percentage on a regular-size playing card, that would be a nearly 2-cm error!”
After experimenting with different methods, he settled on using a laser cutter.
Rob made 102 packs in total; 100 were sold to Kickstarter backers for £19 ($24), he kept one for himself, and he recently visited Guinness World Records HQ to gift us the other!
In addition to the 52 playing cards, Rob’s deck includes two jokers and two blank cards, just like a regular deck.
What they lack in playability, they make up for in portability; two complete decks can be laid out on the back of a single regular card.
Besides producing the cards, photographing them also proved to be a challenge.
Rob said: “The cards are really fiddly to handle, and getting good shots of them was tricky. I also had to be incredibly careful not to drop them – a sneeze could've been disastrous!
“It was such a good experience doing this, I've also now applied for the record of the world's largest playing card!”
That record currently belongs to Ramkumar Sarangapani (India), who in 2020 made a card with a height of 2.87 metres (9 ft 5 in).
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