Consult the deck

Introduction
Editions 1-3

For many netizens, an interest in the Oblique Strategies will doubtless lead in a single direction - toward use. By virtue of the fact that the original Oblique Strategies decks were produced in limited number for all four editions (and, in the case of the fourth edition, not available to the public at large at all), the desire to consult the deck for purposes of either divination or simple good advice has necessitate all kinds of creativity. Long before I ever acquired my first deck of the Strategies, I had a handmade set, done with my favorite fountain pen and a pack of index cards. The complete listings of each of the various editions of the Oblique Strategies at this web site should easily allow you to either choose a given edition and reproduce it exactly, or pick and choose among the Strategies which seem of greatest use to you, adding your own good advice as necessary.

Several enterprising netizens with an urge to program have used the materials from the original version of these web pages to produce various programs which imitate the act of randomly choosing a card using Hypercard, Java, Apple OS Applets, CGI scripts, and so on. You can find a small selection of these programs by clicking here.

I decided that it was time to take the information collected here and make a consultable Oblique Strategies web page. This page contains all the aphorisms from every one of the four various editions, along with a few strays culled from Eno's diary and the occasional magazine article mention. It is, in effect, a kind of "meta-deck," from which you can draw a card. I've tried to set up the CGI script to produce output which bears a slight resemblance to the real cards used in the first three editions (for reasons obvious to the reader, reproducing copies of edition four would be extremely difficult) - the white card which appears on your screen is the same size as the original deck. The lower right-hand corner of each "card" is labeled with a number of designator which tells you the source of the Strategy (e.g., something labeled "1-4" appears in every single one of the Oblique Strategy decks. A card labeled "diary" contains an Oblique Strategy which appears in Eno's diary, and so on).

You can draw your first card by clicking here. Thereafter, simply reload the page to draw another card.

A reader-contributed deck of Strategies called the Acute Strategies is available to you. You can click here to submit a Strategy of your own, or here to consult the deck in its present form. As above, reload the page to draw another card.

Finally, this site includes a copy of the French edition of the Oblique Strategies that you can consult quand il faut necessaire. As above, Click here to draw a card. As above, reload the page to draw another card.

Edition 4
Other editons
Oblique Stratigraphy  
Pick a card  
Acquisiton  
Editions 1-3
Hommages  
Eno links  
 
Editions 1-3  
Oblique Strategies © 1975, 1978, and 1979 Brian Eno/Peter Schmidt
This web page © 1997 Gregory Taylor