Every card carries a fact from McKinley to the New Deal. Every card belongs to one camp — Progressive Republican, Old Guard Republican, Southern Democrat, New Deal Democrat — and covers one issue — who leads, what they want, government and business, race and rights, who backs them. The card tells you neither. Working out the camp is the game.
This is the deck where party stops meaning camp. Two of these camps are Republican and two are Democratic — and the two Democratic camps agree on almost nothing. A Southern Democrat and a New Deal Democrat share a party and sit on opposite sides of race and rights. Watch that row in the answer key: it is the fault line the next fifty years run along.
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.
“New Deal Democrat.”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.
“Southern Democrat. Same issue — race and rights.”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 deck is mostly photographs, because by now the camera was everywhere: Roosevelt and John Muir on horseback in Yosemite, Booker T. Washington, Coolidge signing the Mellon tax bill, immigrants on the ferry from Ellis Island, Eleanor Roosevelt with Mary McLeod Bethune, Frank Tengle the Alabama sharecropper, the Flint sit-down strike, and Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 portrait. The printed record is here too — the 1913 woman-suffrage procession programme, a 1912 Bull Moose button, the McClure’s issue carrying Ida Tarbell on Rockefeller, a WPA Federal Art Project poster, a hand-lettered sign reading “if you like the depression and want more, vote for Hoover,” and the NAACP’s flag: A Man Was Lynched Yesterday. Every image is contemporary with the era.