It's pretty hard to shuffle a deck with 256 cards in it even when you're looking at it.
It's a problem I never expected to produce.
Eh...it's an even power of 2. There are plenty of sorting and shuffling algorithms that appreciate that, so I would claim this as a feature and not a problem.
The fact that there are 2^8 of these also gives you a nice compact way to express Kingdoms as strings of 10 extended ASCII characters...although some of those kingdoms would print out kind of funny these days. I personally haven't seen a bonafide vertical tab (^k in control character notation or \v in escape notation) in years.
Or just five Unicode characters! Those would print out really funny though.
But one of those Unicode kingdoms is almost certainly a Perl program that can print its own source code!
ITs really not that difficult... Each card has a unique integer ID so randomly choose your 10(or however many). sort them (so the same cards are always in the same order) and base32/64 encode it.
You'll end up with a kingdomID something like 3245FAB4...
Chuck the algo on github and we can share them stupidly simply
(OK OK.. I'll do it tonight if the wiki provides an easy enough way to get an id).
EDIT:
OK, each card is a 16bit value, 6 bits for the card id (card number is defined order (alphabetical for boxes and appearance order for promos) for each box). 4 bits for the box id (base == 0, intrigue 1, etc. for reprints and merged boxes cards would only be in the original appearance box). Then we are left with 6 bits to use as needed. Right now I can only think of using one to mark the BANE card, and one to mark a black market card, unused must be 0. Then you concat each card in the correct order, base32 it and boom, unique kingdom.
What other id markers are needed?