Dealing Cards/Tiles in Pairs problem

In order to work you would have to randomly assign matching pairs of cards (or it would work equally well with tiles) to people at the start. Its important that no-one knows what each other has.

e.g.
Player 1 gets both red queens
Player 2 gets both black kings etc.

You cant just shuffle and deal the deck or people wont get matching pairs.

You could deal out one of the pair and get everyone to secretly take a card that matches it, but people who selected their cards later would know which cards were missing, and could be able to work out what others had.

You could pair up the cards and place them face down on the table then randomly assign them, but the person who sorted them might remember where they put them and know who had which cards.

Any ideas?

I'm kind of interested to know what mechanic needs this.

Anyway, depending on how many pairs there are, you can clip the pairs together with small clips before shuffling.

I may have something better later, but the first thing that comes to mind is a system like this:

One player makes pairs face-down and then stacks them up, theoretically randomly, though obviously he might remember some.

Each player in turn (staring with the player after the guy who made the pairs) immediately deals face-down an even number of cards in a stack, any even number he chooses. He then takes the next two cards off the deck, and places the remainder of the deck on top of the stack he just made, forming the new deck.

The last player to do this is the player who made the stack in the beginning, who also deals the even number immediately. If he can still track how many he should count off to get some ideal pair, you shouldn't be playing cards with him. Seriously.

Edited to note that you can obviously come up with more complex/fiddly versions of this, like a player counting of some kind of extra stacks that are later combined or something, but I think this version is sufficiently confounding yet not too hard to do. And you can only blame yourself for the number you counted off! :)
-- Matthew

Building off that:

One player makes the pairs. Another player piles the cards into a deck randomly without looking at the faces without the first player looking. Now just deal out the pairs.

Simple and easy as long as you have two or more players.

You could use those plastic card protectors they use for Magic cards and baseball cards. Just put both cards of each pair into a sleeve, shuffle up the sleeves, deal them out, and have the players take the cards out of the sleeves once the dealing was through.