The business card trading card game

Maarten Wiedenhof
August 6, 2012

We will be attending gamescom 2012! We won’t be having a booth, we’re mainly going there for business.

I figured that we needed business cards, so I made some. I thought it would be fun for our business cards to represent a game. And by represent a game, I mean *be* a game.

I wanted a game that could be played with our business cards and I wanted it to be so simple that it could be played in less than a minute at a busy convention. I picked rock-paper-scissors for the basis of the game.

  1. Each player picks rock, paper, or scissors.
  2. At the exact same moment, players throw their pick.
  3. Rock wins from scissors, paper wins from rock, scissors wins from paper.

(On a side note: I like how even a simple, ‘balanced’ game like rock-paper-scissors has a strategy for winning. I you know that rock is the most popular throw, playing paper is most beneficial. Except when your opponent has this knowledge also, in which cast you’ll need scissors to counter his paper. These statistical and psychological nuances make rock-paper-scissors one of my favorite methods to settle disputes. Directly following sword fighting.)

Now, for the business card trading card game, I drew my colleagues RPG-esque pictures and added some stats:

Each character has (besides contact information and a picture):

  • a base strength
  • a type (currently red, green or blue)
  • an effect

The back of the card contains two items, which each have an effect as well.

With these elements, the rules for our business card game are as follows:

  1. Each player decides on a combination of one character, and one optional item.
  2. At the exact same moment, players present their combination.
  3. Evaluate the effects of all items and characters.
  4. The player with the highest strength (effects considered) wins the game.

Happy networking!

PS: Gotta catch ’em all!