Voyager Tarot – Tarot Review

The Voyager Tarot was one of my very first decks, given to me as a gift when I was just learning by someone who wasn’t familiar with Tarot at all. That’s unfortunate because this is not a beginner deck. Attempting to use it just confused me when I was getting my bearings.

Since those early days the Voyager has become a fantastic tool. I just needed to know what to do with it first.

The Deck

One of the first things anyone notices about this deck is the sheer size. It is significantly larger than most other decks. That’s bad news for shuffling but great news for image clarity. And image clarity is an important factor with the Voyager Tarot.

Comparing the Voyager Tarot with the Gilded Tarot. The individual cards AND the stacked decks are larger for the Voyager.

This is a modern Tarot deck created entirely with photo collage, giving it a very unique feel. The images come from cultures and practices around the world – making it workable regardless of personal religious affiliation – and figuring out the nuance each image represents in a given card’s meaning is part of the fun with this deck.

However, it does mean that this deck is a one-off. While the cards loosely correlate to standard meanings they are by no means exact, and some of the names have been changed too.

Major Arcana cards from the Voyager Tarot. Notice the cards for “Fool-Child” (Fool), “Art” (Temperance) and “Time-Space” (Judgment).

The images are crisp and sharp, as you’d expect from a photo-based deck, but unlike the Golden Tarot by Kat Black no attempt was made to smooth the pieces into one united image. They’re all jumbled together, which forces the eye to jump around to make any sense of what you’re seeing. That’s kinda the point.

The Aces of the Voyager Tarot. Here we can see the Suits. Cups and Wands are standard, but the Voyager switches out Swords for Crystals and Pentacles for Worlds.

The deck comes with a fairly informative little booklet, better than the standard LWB, but for $20 a specific Voyager guide is available. It’s even free for KU subscribers! I’d suggest it if you really want to dive into these. There are so many layers here that details can be missed if they’re not specifically pointed out.

Using the Deck

I’ll state straight-up that I do not use these cards for readings except in the very rarest of cases. That’s because these cards feel, for me, more like targeted scrying than cartomancy.

That’s not to say that others don’t read these all the time with fab results. They do. I, however, read the Voyager Tarot almost exclusively with free association. Sure I use basic Tarot keywords as I go, but nine times out of ten the meaning I draw from the card has less to do with those keywords and more to do with where my mind goes when my eyes catch on a certain image, or even a pattern of images across numerous cards.

That being said, these are excellent for meditations and creative visualization prompts. Their size is a bonus here as there’s more card to fall into. I don’t like them for Tarot-based spell work, because their scope makes that feel messy to me, but they rock for Card-a-Day pulls too. Anything more introspective or intuitively-based could easily benefit from adding these in.

I would absolutely not recommend these for a beginning cartomancer. However, if you’re strictly looking for a tool to help with self-development or meditation work it’s hard to go wrong with these, even if you’ve never touched another Tarot deck before. I’d also recommend these for scryers to are stepping into the world of Tarot for the first time, or for Tarot people who want to start scrying. They’re a fantastic bridge for that.

Available here, for less than $10 new if you go through a third party seller.