WE WANT YOUR SCRIBBLED-ON PLAYING CARDS AND INSIDE JOKES
SHORT VERSION: please send us your personalised playing cards! Cards you’ve made specially for friends, cards you’ve drawn on, blank cards from commercial games you’ve filled in, whatever! We’ll exhibit them at our festival. If your cards were made digitally you can send us the files and we’ll print them; if they’re physical, you’ll need to post them, but if you’re in the UK we can send you a stamped self-addressed envelope to do that with (see details at the bottom of the page).
And now for the LONG VERSION:
Now Play This 2019 is a festival of experimental game design, running at Somerset House from 6-14 April as part of London Games Festival.
As part of this year’s festival, we’re collecting personalised cards from games. You know the sort of thing: the Monopoly card that you’ve redrawn with a picture of your old flat, the blank Apples to Apples card where you’ve put the adjective “unseemly” which you’re pretty sure was a joke you no longer quite remember, the 1000 Blank White Cards monster that is in fact a bad drawing of your then-housemate’s terrible ex; even something from the printed-out deck of standard playing cards where you photoshopped a picture of your dog onto the face of the king. If you can send in any stories about the cards too then that’s great, but just the cards themselves is wonderful.
We’ll turn all of these cards into one big artwork and display it as part of the festival. We’ll also document the work and put it online, and write up an analysis of the cards that we’re sent. We think that showing the ways that people create and transform their own personalised cards is a great way of looking at how we play games.
To do all this, we need cards. YOUR cards. You send them; we collect them; we work with an artist to get them all on the wall and looking nice; people come and look.
Because we’ll be turning the cards into one big artwork and then archiving it, we won’t be able to send them back to you, but we’ll document them all clearly online and store them afterwards. We will of course credit you!
WHY?
We want to look at the ways that games can be private experiences for a particular person or family or workplace or group of friends; at how tabletop games can develop house rules, and private jokes, and different ways of playing among different groups; at games as something transformed by their players. We think by showing a wide cross-section of cards that have been customised, we can show a really interesting range of the different ways that people approach games and the different contexts they exist in.
WHAT DO WE WANT?
Anything shaped like a playing card that you’ve personalised for a game with a particular group – could be just one or two cards, could be loads.
- If you’ve got a card game where the game included some blank cards for you to personalise, then we want those
- Or if you have an existing card where you’ve scribbled something out, drawn a picture, added a sticker or otherwise customised or changed the card
- If you’ve drawn your own cards as part of a game you’re making up for a particular situation, or a game of 1000 Blank White Cards or Dvorak or something similar, we’d love one or two of those
- Cards from Legacy games that you’ve customised as part of the gameplay are also great, if you think they’re particularly interesting or personal to your group!
- It’s fine if you made the cards digitally and printed them out and cut them up, as long as they fit into this general category of personalised card, private joke, etc.
If you’ve got a card you don’t want to give up, then feel free to draw as good a copy as you can and send that, but we do need a physical card, not a photo or a scan. Obviously if you made the cards digitally in the first place then another printout is fine, we don’t need it to be the original!
We can’t 100% guarantee that we’ll include every single card sent, but our intention is definitely to use as many of them as we possibly can.
A bit of swearing or a slightly rude picture is okay – if in doubt, feel free to email holly@mathesonmarcault.com
WHAT DON’T WE WANT
We don’t want:
- Any game pieces which aren’t basically cards (index cards or business cards are fine)
- Anything from Cards Against Humanity
- Cards from prototypes of games that were intended for wider release or further development
- Anything which would violate our attendance policy
WHAT TO DO
If you have cards that you originally made as digital files and then printed out, then as long as you just printed them on normal card, sending us the pdf of the print file (preferably as A4) will be fine, and we’ll print the cards again at our end. In this case, send the pdf to holly@mathesonmarcault.com with subject line “personalised cards contribution”. If you’d like to include any stories about how or why you made the cards, then please do, we’d love to know more!
If you made physical cards, then if you can just send us the cards, that would be perfect! Please include your name as well if you would like to be credited. Any stories about the cards you want to include you can either pop in the envelope, or send by email with subject line “personalised cards story” and a picture of the cards themselves so we can match the cards to the story.
Either way, we will need to receive the cards by Tuesday 26 March 2019 in order to use them for the show.
For hard copies, please post the cards to:
Holly Gramazio
PO Box 70978
South Norwood Delivery Office
Holmesdale Road, London
SE25 6PL
If you’re in the UK and would like to send us your cards without having to buy a stamp, then we can send you a stamped self-addressed envelope: please email holly@mathesonmarcault.com with subject line “envelope for cards”, and your address. We’ll post an envelope to that address with another stamped envelope inside; you put your cards in that second envelope and send it back.
Unfortunately we’re not able to do this for places outside the UK.