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.