The Business Card Trading Card Game was invented to incentivize swapping cards among friends in hobbyist communities and at conventions.
Literally any business card can be added to a deck simply. You only need two players with one card each to get started.
Intent
In the 90s, hobby and fandom meetups would pass around VHS tapes, booklets, and CDs to help pass their work around within their respective communities.
Now that everything is digital, these physical pieces of memorabilia rarely get passed around anymore.
So I decided to invent an easy to access method and game to share our social media and work among our friends at meetups and conventions in a fun and interesting way.
BusinessCardTCG uses the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
The rock paper scissors icons were made by Fission Strategy, are public domain, and can be found here.
Cards must have 1 of 3 icons on them: Rock, Paper, or Scissors.
Cards should be business card size (3.5" x 2" or ~51 mm x 89mm).
Cards should be one-sided.
Cards must have the icon on only one side.
Other than this, cards can have literally anything on them!
You can retroactively include business cards you already own by drawing the icon on the card or printing stickers with the icons on them and placing them on the card(s) you'd like to use.
Paper Icon beats Rock Icon.
Rock Icon beats Scissors Icon.
Scissors Icon beats Paper Icon.
Different Play Methods
There are two players. They shuffle their decks and place them face down. They each draw the first card and place it face up. Winning icon wins the game. You can play any number of rounds. The minimum deck size is one.
There are two players. They shuffle their decks and them face down. They each draw 3 cards and place them into their hand. They play their chosen card from their hand face down. When both players are ready, they reveal their played cards. Winning icon wins the game. You can play any number of rounds. The minimum deck size is 3.
There are two players. They look through their decks for one card of each icon plus an additional card of their choice (4 cards total). They place these cards into their hand. Each round, they play one card face down until both players are ready. Then they reveal the cards at the same time.
Each card in their hand can only be played once. Play continues until they are out of cards in their hand. The winner is determined by either the first win or the most wins. The minimum deck size is 4.
You can make up your own rules. It can be Roshambo-based or based on something entirely different. Maybe you each have large decks, so you play a modified game of Go Fish for a pair of two cards with a specific name, letter, or theme. Perhaps you share a deck and play a community-specific version of Guess Who.
The options are limitless.
Required Icons
In order to play the game, the business card must have 1 of 3 icons: Rock, Paper, or Scissors.
The suggested icons are these public domain ones made by Fission Strategy. They have been re-uploaded here in /icons/ in both PNG and SVG formats.
These icons can be any orientation, color, or size, as long as they are immediately legible on the card.
However, you can use other icons that represent the same thing, as long as they are easily understood.
Design
The cards should be the standard business card size of 3.5" x 2". In /templates/ you will find a very basic PSD and PNG file of the appropriate size.
Your card can have literally anything on it as long as it has one of the 3 icons. Some sample cards have been provided for inspiration and starter decks in /free cards/
Printing
Cheapest
The cheapest method is obviously printing the cards yourself using cardstock and cutting the paper yourself or buying paper specifically made for printing business cards at home.
Easiest - One Design
The easiest way to print one card multiple times (e.g. your own card for swapping) is to find literally any printing service and give them the image file of your card. This could take the form of an only service such as vistaprint, or an office store like staples.
Easiest - A Custom Deck (many designs)
Makeplayingcards.com has no minimum order and the ability to customize every card, front and back. You can make business card sized cards there. Here is a direct link to that product page. You can also make cool custom deck boxes there. I have printed with them in the past and they've made me brand loyal. (the link to them is not an affiliate link)
MakePlayingCards.com has its own downloadable templates, an optional software to use to design cards, and always prints rounded corners. I've included their template in /templates/. There's also some premade templates for MPC that have [MPC] in their name.
Feel free to contact me on Discord: @standardquip (Vars).
You can also start a discussion, issue, and/or pull request.