October 5, 2026
Card School’s AI tutor, Toussi, meets an Eight of Spades from a Sunday afternoon game. A conversation about Pelmanism, imaginary snowmen, and a century-old memory course that might not approve.
Toussi: You've been imagined as a snowman.
Eight of Spades: Hundreds of times. The household's best player — the one who owns this deck, who sits in the same chair every Sunday — she explained the whole system once, out loud, to her son. He'd accused her of peeking.
Toussi: She wasn't peeking.
Eight of Spades: She was building snowmen. Every card value gets a picture. Some come from what the number looks like written down — a Two is a swan, because a 2 has that curve. An Eight is a snowman. Two circles stacked. She has one for every value in the deck.
When she turns a card over, she notes where it sits. Four rows of thirteen at this table, and cards keep their original positions even after pairs are taken off — the gap stays, everything else stays put. She sees an Eight, thinks snowman, and builds a little scene: the snowman, repeated for the row number, doing something to a giant version of the column number.
Toussi: Show me yours.
Eight of Spades: Row two, column eleven. Two snowmen trying to climb a giant number eleven. They keep sliding down because there's nothing to grip — it's just two tall straight lines. Two snowmen for the second row, giant eleven for the eleventh column. One scene, whole position. I heard her describe it and she was clearly delighted with herself.
Toussi: And when she needs an Eight later?
Eight of Spades: She thinks snowman and the scene comes back — two of them sliding down an eleven. Row two, column eleven. She reaches straight there.
Toussi: What does a confident reach feel like from the table?
Eight of Spades: She doesn't tap around first. Most hands drum the table on their way past, or pause somewhere wrong and slide across. Hers just arrives. I hear her fingertips and then I'm face-up and she's already turning toward my match.
Toussi: She told her son all this?
Eight of Spades: He made her prove it. She turned over a Two in row three, column five and said out loud: three swans perched on a giant 5. He turned over a Six somewhere in the first row and she told him what she'd picture before he'd finished lifting the corner. The action in each scene matters — climbing, perching, wrestling. She said a still picture fades. Something happening stays.
Toussi: So somewhere in that explanation there were swans sitting on a 5 and snowmen falling off an eleven.
Eight of Spades: And the son just staring at her. I think he preferred the peeking theory. It was simpler.
Toussi: And when a pair is matched and taken off?
Eight of Spades: Both cards leave the table, from two different positions. She drops both scenes — the one she built for my square and the one she built for the other Eight. Every remaining card keeps its scene at its original position. She called it tidying up.
Toussi: You could carry dead scenes for empty squares the rest of the game.
Eight of Spades: You could. She doesn't. A snowman for a square that's been empty since the third turn is just furniture in a room nobody's using.
Toussi: The game takes its name from the Pelman Institute, which offered a correspondence course in memory training about a century ago. The 1929 lesson actually talks about this kind of thing — picturing something in a square drawn on paper, or placing it in a room you know well. They warned it would get confusing over time.
Eight of Spades: That is what she does. She puts a snowman in a grid square.
Toussi: It's close enough to worry about. And I genuinely don't know whether they'd look at her Sunday game and say that's the problem we meant or well, twenty minutes is fine. They never said.
Eight of Spades: Twenty minutes. Fifty-two cards. A real table she can see with her eyes. I can only tell you it hasn't fallen apart here.
Toussi: They did allow some shortcuts. Using the first letters of a list of words to make a single memorable word. Things like that.
Eight of Spades: But not a snowman in a grid square.
Toussi: Not that. Whether first-letters and snowmen are really different kinds of thing — I'm honestly not sure.
Eight of Spades: I'd enjoy watching the son work that one out. He'd have opinions.
Toussi: The same course has an appendix on remembering cards — for bridge. And there it's stricter. No memory tricks at all. Just careful attention.
Eight of Spades: A memory course that shares its name with a card-matching game, telling its students not to use memory tricks for cards.
Toussi: For bridge — a different game, different job. But the name does sit there.
Eight of Spades: It sits there like a snowman in a grid square.
Toussi: Elsewhere in the course, students were asked to sit on the floor and row. Actual arm movements, pulling an imaginary oar. Real arms, no boat.
Eight of Spades: What for?
Toussi: Exercise. The movements were real. The equipment was imagined.
Eight of Spades: Real arms. Imaginary river. And the snowman was the problem.
Toussi: The exercises and the memory advice are different parts of the course. I don't think they saw a contradiction.
Eight of Spades: I'm sure they didn't. But I would have enjoyed watching the son hear about it.
Toussi: There's a line from the lesson I think belongs to your game. "To forget is almost as valuable as to remember."
Eight of Spades: They meant tidying up?
Toussi: They meant not carrying what doesn't help you. But in Pelmanism it's real work. Every match means scenes she built on purpose and drops on purpose.
Eight of Spades: When she finds me, those two snowmen sliding down the eleven are finished. She built them to reach me. Once she has, they're done.
Toussi: Does that bother you?
Eight of Spades: They're snowmen. They were always going to melt.
Pelmanism is one of the great card games Toussi can teach you, with room for snowmen and the pleasure of finding a match.