Planning Poker Cards: Values, Decks & Printable vs Online

Planning poker cards are the whole tool: a small deck of values that every estimator holds, picks from privately and reveals at the same moment as everyone else. The values are chosen so that a team can express relative effort without pretending to a precision it does not have. This page walks through what is on the cards, the standard decks, the meaning of the special cards, how physical and online cards differ, and how to choose a deck for your team.

What is on a planning poker card

Each card carries a single value. In a numeric deck that is a story-point number; in a t-shirt deck it is a size label. A physical deck gives each participant one full set of cards so that everyone can vote independently, so a team of eight needs eight sets. In an online room the deck is shown on screen and each participant taps one card; the room handles hiding and revealing.

What a card does not carry is a unit. A 5 is not five hours or five days; it is five times a 1, where the 1 is whatever the team agreed to use as its smallest reference story. That is the whole point of relative estimation, and it is why the same deck works for teams with very different velocities. If the distinction is new to you, What is planning poker? and story points vs hours cover it in detail.

Standard planning poker decks

A handful of decks cover nearly every team. Scrum Poker Online ships the Fibonacci, T-Shirt and Powers of 2 decks and lets you build your own.

What the special cards mean

Every deck includes two non-numeric cards, and many physical decks include a third.

• ? means "I cannot estimate this." Not enough information, or the story is unclear. If several people play it, stop voting and clarify the scope. This is the most valuable card in the deck: it turns silent confusion into a visible signal.
• ☕ means "I need a break." Estimation quality drops sharply when people are tired. A coffee card is a polite way to say the session has gone on long enough.
• ∞ or "too big" appears on many printed decks and means the story is beyond the top of the scale and must be split. Online, the same message is sent by playing the highest card, or by playing ? and saying why.

Some decks also carry a 0 and a ½. Zero means "no work" or "already done"; the half card is for tasks so small that even a 1 overstates them. Whether you use them is a team convention.

Physical cards vs online cards

Printed decks were the original and still work well for teams who share a room. The comparison is mostly about logistics.

If you want printable cards, the values above are all you need: print each value on a card-sized piece of paper, one set per person. For anything beyond an occasional in-person session, an online deck removes the busywork and keeps the focus on the discussion, which is where the value of the technique lives. Our Scrum Poker guide walks through a full online session.

How to choose a deck

Ask three questions:

1. What are you estimating? Sprint stories: Fibonacci. Epics, roadmap items or anything more than a sprint away: t-shirt sizes. Work with high uncertainty where you want early splitting: Powers of 2.
2. Who is voting? Engineers used to story points are fine with numbers. Mixed or non-technical groups usually prefer sizes.
3. What does your tracker expect? If velocity is tracked in points, use a numeric deck or agree a size-to-point mapping before the session.

Whatever you choose, change it rarely. The value of an estimation scale comes from the team's accumulated feel for it, and every switch resets that. When you create a room in Scrum Poker Online the deck is selected once for the room, and the same deck appears on every participant's screen. If your team regularly disagrees after the reveal, the problem is rarely the deck; see reaching estimation consensus for what usually helps.

Frequently asked questions