Tarot gaming

". . . Almost everything you read about the tarot is bullshit.  But if you take the cards as archetypes for different kinds of human motives and behaviors, it becomes a kind of war-gaming system.

When a person looks at a problem, it's always in a particular context.  Most of the time he'd be blinded to possible answers by his own prejudice.  By gaming the problem, you're forced outside your prejudices."

From Jon Sandford's The Fool's Run and you can read this page in context via Amazon's search inside the book.

When I first read Sandford's book, the tarot/game theory stuff that the character did intrigued me.  Unfortunately, all the research that I did on the internet did not yield any specific guidelines on how to practice game theory with the tarot.  I suppose that I could have picked up a set of tarot cards, done a little research, and assigned the archetypes to the cards, and figured out how to do a spread.

Today at this post on The Occupational Adventure, the author referenced this post on TarotTools, which gave the following advice:

A daily reading is a good enhancement to that stuffy, fifteen-minute daily review of goals they teach to Franklin-Covey graduates. It provides perspective and context for your plans, and may remind you of tasks you've overlooked.

The process for a daily reading is as follows:

1. Shuffle the deck and draw 3 cards: Card 1 is the topic card and something you know or need to be aware of; Card 2 is the reason card and why you Card 1 is important today; Card 3 is the action card and is what you can do
2. Read the cards and embrace the ideas that occur to you (probably best to read the Making Meaning article before you interpret the cards).

Seems like a pretty effective method for kick-starting your brain to think in other directions.  I guess the attraction for me is that you have a very portable, fairly easy-to-use "device" that gets you to think outside of your normal rut.