At first, I thought that these dry erase playing cards seemed like a weird concept. Who wants to draw an entire pack of playing cards by hand when there are already so many great professionally designed packs out there?

Then I looked a little deeper.

As it turns out, the ‘playing cards’ bit in the name is something of a misnomer. People generally aren’t using these to craft custom playing card decks — they’re using them as flash cards for study purposes, or jotting down thoughts for later, or sketching out design ideas, or keeping track of board game points and/or RPG character stats, or creating proxies/tokens for TCGs like Magic: The Gathering…the list goes on.

No matter what the use-case, the fact that the cards can be wiped clean and reused makes them a nice alternative to disposable index cards. And yes, if you wanted, you can use them to create games of your own making, whether it’s a full-on trivia game or simply a round of Tic-Tac-Toe or Hangman.

Basically, they’re everything that makes dry erase boards so handy to have around, only more portable. The only limit is your imagination, really.

A pack of 180 dry erase cards is $13 on Amazon. You can also get a smaller pack of 45 cards for just $7.