Wits is a card game for three to six players. You hold five cards. On your turn you lay one on the pile and name, out loud, the group that card belongs to. Empty your hand first and you win.
Each card shows a period photograph and a single fact. It never names the group. You work that out from the fact. The game calls these groups camps. This deck holds four camps — Liberal, Conservative, Nationalist, Socialist — and every card also sits on one issue: who should vote, the economy, religion and tradition, the nation, how change comes.
Three questions crack most cards. Should the vote follow property, birth, blood, or work? Is the market to be left alone, protected, or taken over? And does change come by statute, by tradition, by war, or by rising? Teach that pattern first.
This is a table game, not a browser game. The demo below is for the projector: run a few turns with the class so everyone sees how a turn works, then print the decks and play it for real.
Your hand. Pick a card to play — then say which camp it belongs to.
At a real table nothing is revealed and nobody checks a screen. The players judge each other, and the challenge rule settles it.
Play a card from the same camp as the top card and say the camp out loud. You never have to name the issue.
"French."Stuck in a camp you do not hold? Play a different camp's card that is about the same issue, and say both. The pile switches to the camp you named.
"Dutch. Same issue — religion."Think someone named the wrong camp, or called an Outwit that does not match? Call it. Call it right and they take the card back and draw 2. Call it wrong and you draw 2. No card prints its camp, so bluffing works.
Cannot do either? Play any card and name a camp anyway. Nobody can see the card but you. Roughly seven bluffs in ten go unchallenged.
Draw one card. Play it if it fits, otherwise your turn ends.
First player out of cards wins. At one card left, say "Wit!" — caught silent and you draw 2. You cannot go out on a Wild Wit; the last card has to be a fact.
Play it on anything except a Devil's Advocate. Then name the camp that comes next. It buries the issue, so the next player matches the camp or draws.
Play it on anything except a Devil's Advocate. The next player is witless — they lose their turn.
The next player may not match the camp, and no action card will save them. Outwit on the issue, or take a flat draw of 2.
One PDF, 112 pages, holding seven complete decks so a class can play seven tables at once. Each deck opens with its own table sheet — how a turn works on the front, the teacher answer key on the back — then 60 cards, backs numbered by deck so a card found on the floor tells you which deck it belongs to. Cut the stack apart and every table has a complete kit.
Print double-sided, flipped on the long edge, and cut the cards on the lines. Cards are 2.4″ × 3.2″, nine to a sheet. Print at 100% — not "fit to page" — or the sizing drifts.
Every image in the deck is in the public domain, sourced from Wikimedia Commons. No AI-generated art is used anywhere in this deck — a history game is the wrong place for a convincing fake. Among them: Champlain's own 1613 engraving of his battle alongside Huron and Algonquin allies, his Habitation de Québec, the c.1626 print of Fort New Amsterdam, Romeyn de Hooghe's etching of the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam, Saenredam's austere interior of the Grote Kerk, Titian's Philip II, Rigaud's Louis XIV, a 1740 view of St. Augustine, José Joaquín Magón's casta painting El Mestizo, Underhill's 1638 plan of the Pequot fort, and the 1788 Brookes stowage diagram. A few images are later depictions of the era rather than contemporary prints — the Pueblo Revolt mural (1936), Boughton's Puritans Going to Church (1884), and the 1920 Mayflower Compact stamp.