Every card carries a fact from the age of machines, trusts and reform. Every card belongs to one camp — Stalwart, Progressive, Populist, Industrialist — and covers one issue — who leads, what they want, money and business, how they operate, who backs them. The card tells you neither. Working out the camp is the game.
Four camps, four answers to one question: who should run the economy? The party, and it should pay its friends. Whoever built it, and government should stay out. The farmers, through a government that owns the railroads. Or experts and regulators, refereeing the whole thing. Teach those four positions first, and the deck sorts itself.
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. That is what the challenge rule is for, and it is why bluffing works.
Play a card from the same camp as the top card and say the camp out loud. That is the whole turn — you never have to name the issue.
“Populist.”Stuck in a camp you do not hold? Play a different camp’s card that is about the same issue, and say both. The camp is now yours. It is the hardest move in the game.
“Industrialist. Same issue — money and business.”Think a declaration does not hold up? Call it. Wrong, and they take the card back and draw 2. Right, and you draw 2. Nothing is printed on the cards, so you can bluff — and that is the point.
Holding a card that matches the top card on both camp and issue? Lay it down as a second card after your play — the only way to shed two facts at once — or slap it down out of turn. Hard to spot, since neither is printed anywhere.
Draw one card and play it if it fits. Still stuck, draw again — up to three — then your turn ends. Not knowing the material costs you tempo, every single turn.
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.
Your whole turn. Play it with any card, even one that matches nothing. Name that card’s camp and argue the connection. The table judges.
The next player may not match the camp, and no action card will save them. Cross over on the issue, or take a flat draw of 2 — no digging.
One PDF, 86 pages: a rules sheet, a teacher answer key, and seven complete decks so a class can play seven tables at once. Card backs are numbered by deck, so a card found on the floor tells you which deck it belongs to.
Print double-sided, flip on the long edge, and cut 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. This is the golden age of the American political cartoon, and the deck leans on it: Nast’s Tweed and his Tammany tiger, Keppler’s Bosses of the Senate and his Credit Mobilier Hari-Kari, Wales’s Great Presidential Puzzle with Conkling working a box of delegates, Keller’s railroad octopus The Curse of California, the Standard Oil octopus, the free-silver jabberwock, and Graetz’s Stalwart Stupidity. Alongside them: the 1873 Grange print Gift for the Grangers, a People’s Party poster of 1892, a McKinley sound-money poster, the first edition of The Jungle, a Nebraska sod-house family, and photographs of Roosevelt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, Edison, Tarbell and Bryan. Every image is contemporary with the era.