Card Decks
Planning poker cards give a team a shared vocabulary for effort. The deck you pick shapes how estimation feels: some decks push for granularity, others for speed. Understanding the common decks helps you choose one that matches how your team plans.
The Fibonacci deck, one through twenty-one and beyond, is the most popular because its widening gaps discourage arguing over neighboring numbers. Powers of two, one, two, four, eight, and sixteen, behave similarly with even sharper jumps.
T-shirt sizes, XS through XL, trade numeric precision for speed and are ideal for early triage. Custom decks let a team define its own scale when none of the standard options fit its workflow.
The question mark card means someone lacks the information to estimate. It is a prompt to clarify the story, not a vote, and it should never be averaged into a number.
Some decks include a coffee or break card to signal the team needs to pause. Small conveniences like these keep long estimation sessions humane without changing the underlying method.
Pick Fibonacci or powers of two when you want velocity data and granular backlog planning. Pick T-shirt sizing when you want fast, high-level sorting that non-technical stakeholders understand instantly.
Whatever you choose, keep it consistent. Switching decks mid-project resets the shared meaning of your estimates and makes historical velocity harder to interpret.
A typical Fibonacci deck uses one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, and twenty-one, often with a question mark and sometimes a zero or a half.
Yes. estimation.click supports custom card sets so teams with their own scale can estimate without forcing their work into a standard deck.
The gap is intentional. It prevents debate over false precision and pushes the team to pick the nearest honest bucket for larger, less certain work.