A new deck of E physical cards composed of X subdecks of cards is disclosed. Each subdeck represents a category as part of human life or from our world, and comprises of at least 26 cards, each card having a face side that bears a letter of the alphabet, including 21 consonants and 5 vowels. All the cards of the deck are indistinguishable when facing down (have the same font, shape, color, and pattern) but when facing up, each card is identified by the category associated with, by one of the 26 alphabetic letters A to Z and by the name and photo of an item the card/category is associated with, if any. The deck of cards establishes a grid of X-26 cells, whereas each cell includes a single blank card without an item, or a single or multiple non-blank cards each is associated with an item. A gaming system including the deck of cards and a unique ranking system of R levels is used to play games. The gaming system is applied to play social and gambling games with physical cards or in a virtual environment executed by a video game application on a computing device.

An educational card game includes a plurality of cards defining a deck of cards. Each of the cards has indicia thereon. The indicia comprise a letter or a word and each of the indicia is unique to no greater than four of the cards such that no more than four of the cards have the same indicia positioned thereon. A plurality of holders is provided and each holds a number of the cards in a vertical orientation.