Canon: TCG

Update: Thanks to people like you, we doubled our goal in the first 12 hours! There is still time to back it and get some of the first cards! But hurry, because some of the tiers will get phased out soon. Check down below to learn about our 15k Stretch Goal.

A trading card game for the liberating arts canon that is beautiful, collectible, and playable. The long-term vision is to foster love and curiosity for great texts, fascinating people, and big ideas across the liberating arts: literature, science, math, and art, all within the frame of history itself.

Immediate mission: This Kickstarter is to get things moving. Its creator, David McKerracher, M.A., had been paying for everything out of pocket and working in isolation. His wife said he needed to find others to support the creative side of this project. This is about getting that funding for original art, and building up the playtesting community.

Short-term goal: get these booster packs for the Philosophers set to people, so that we can share our excitement. Each pack comes with randomized cards with varying rarity, each with human-made original art. Philosopher cards, Text cards (books by those philosophers), and Timenergy cards (the resource in this game).

Each booster pack has ten cards: at least five Philosopher cards, at least three Text cards, at least one Timenergy card, and always at least one shiny, rare card. You might pull a foil Plato, Nietzsche, or Augustine, or someone you know less well, like Edith Stein. 

Will you be the one to pull the extremely rare alt-art Slavoj Žižek? 

This card was for our $15,000 stretch card. Everyone who pledged before 15,000 has been guaranteed this card. Everyone who pledges afterward still has a shot at winning it in a booster pack, though only if lucky! We will soon be announcing another stretch goal - in similar fashion, it will be something ultra rare only pledges prior to 20k are guaranteed.

Secretly educational too:

For those who do want to go deeper into the ideas, there are lectures for the cards. We currently have twenty-seven lectures and counting. Imagine you pull a Plato card. You love the way it looks or plays, so you decide to check out the card on the website. That's where you see a lecture and other resources on the site. This could become a whole rabbit hole for you, kindling curiousity and giving inspiration.

50,000 years from now, there is no humanity, just demigods, slaves, and the galaxy-spanning machines that they serve. You're going to save the world by reading.

You are a time traveler from the distant grimdark future. Long after humanity lost the humanities and melded with machines, there has been nothing but conquest and optimiation for its own sake. In this future, scholarly activities are heavily restricted and punished with extreme impunity. With a recent regime change, you have been freed from prison to go on a mission. You are being sent back to the time right before humanity lost itself, to salvage a canon of texts that can be preserved underground for 50,000 years.

This illustration, providing a gimpse into the world you are from, is a gift from Timothy Brumley, a Magic: The Gathering Artist who supports this Kickstarter:

You are sent to the year 1992, at the dawn of the Cyber Era (which roughly begins in 1992 with the home computer going mainstream). There you will learn to blend in, get a job, and then slowly but surely collect texts that you will read once you've been able to free up timenergy (more on that below). 

You only have 40 years to build up an underground canon school that can have a hope of surviving the rapidly approaching Neo Dark Age. But beware: there are other time travelers on the same mission, and only one canon will get chosen in the future. Everyone else will be forgotten…

As a kid I loved Pokemon, even though I never really played. Friends played Magic or Yu-Gi-Oh! as well. There is just something magical about it the randomization of cards with different rarity distributions and all of the art and love that gets poured into these things. 

In college, making flash cards, I always thought, "These would be so much cooler if they were designed like trading cards..." The issue with flash cards is that they're for memorizing facts and figures, for cramming for tests, for basically turning the liberating arts into something about labor and status instead of exploration and learning as a way of life. 

Over time, "Pokemon but for philosophers" grew into "Magic, but the whole liberal arts canon." I'm too hold for such games, but I love learning and, as a father, I want my children and their children's children to have games that are hands-on (off screens), that make them want to trade with others and, crucially, that will make them want to know more about history's greatest minds, movers, and events.

Last summer, after encouragement from my wife, I dove in fully to this. I spent months designing cards, researching different games, honing in on specific mechanics, and seeing how tweaking them this way or that changed the dynamics of people at a table. Then I started playtesting Canon: TCG with casual players and hardcore gamers alike.

For nine months I carried a box of hand-cut cards into kitchens and back rooms in Toronto, Vancouver, the Bay Area, Billings, Boise, Reno, Seattle, Spokane, and Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. I shared my game with people who had never played a trading card game or read a lick of philosophy.

They had fun. Even seasoned Magic players enjoyed it. You don't need to know anything about philosophy, science, mathematics, to have fun with this game. My goal was to design a game that serious tabletop gamers could play across from casual players, and that liberal arts professors could play with total novices. The game has now passed this test in nine cities.

[This section focuses on a few basic mechanics of the Main Game. If it sounds too complicated, don't worry! There are also mini games, which are for all ages and no more complicated than Go Fish; and some people will just want to collect anyway. What follows is for the people interested in deck-building TCGs.]

You assemble a figurative Council of historical figures that help you read: Homer, Hildegard, Milton, Plato, Nietzsche, St. Augustine, Virilio, or maybe even Žižek (yes, he gave permission for us to use his likeness!). Each member on your council brings unique and often desirable constant and activated abilities that make for unique decks and play styles. Their abilities loosely rhyme with something from their worldview, personality, or history. For example, Marx gets free cards when others have special bonus draws. Plato can Ponder, meaning he can look at the top of his deck. Aquinas's constant ability is Literacy 2, meaning he extends your hand limit from 7 to 9.

The main goal is to reread texts. First you collect the books into your Library. You get to move them into your Canon only when you have read them all the way through, which takes multiple passes and costs more each time. A first read grants your basic sense of the territory, but already makes you temporarily Fade a Council Member. A second read fades another, and then to read the third time you have to Sacrifice one for good to the Forgotten Wastes (discard pile).

Every cost in this game is paid in timenergy. Not gold, mana, or action points, but instead the most relatable thing in the world: reliably repeatable large blocks of time-with-energy. Because we don't have timenergy, reading in a mode of active leisure is hard to attain. As a time traveler from the distant future, you have to painstakingly free up your timenergy so that you can collect and read books for your canon, which you can then share with your family and canon school that will keep the texts alive in the long Neo Dark Ages ahead. 

Timenergy is a concept I have been developing for about a decade, through a master's thesis, then my frist book Waypoint, then in Timenergy, the book with a foreword by Slavoj Žižek (the most famous living philosopher, "the Elvis of cultural theory"). Timenergy is something we never have enough of and, at the same time, that lack is something that we all share. 

There are two play-styles in Canon: TCG the Main Game: Casual, and Tournament. In Tournament play, the timenergy cards are mixed into the main decks and you never know when you'll get it. In casual play, the timenergy stack is a separate pile that you get to draw at least one from each round. 

As a time traveler who is seeking relative canon mastery, you must free up as much timenergy from work as possible so that you can study, organize reading groups, read with your kids and grandchildren and, ultimately, pass forward a legacy that will otherwise be lost, swallowed up by the endless dark of ignorance and cruelty. 

All completed cards in this game have been made by real people. Franklin Calles has done the most to-date. I met him through the friend of a friend. He makes vector art from Venezuela, where every dollar makes a big difference for his family. 

The same is true for the design: the abilities on the cards were worked out at a table by me playing the game, usually with my brother Andrew, who was also paid for his participation. I consider him the co-designer of the original ability system. 

The longer-term vision of this game involves a LOT of original art and tons of playtesting. This is the kind of thing I'm really excited about, but we need to build a community of people who appreciate art or who love playing games and learning. That's the real goal of this first Kickstarter goal! To get some cards in your hands so you can get excited about the possibilities we are actively making real!

Behind the first set list sits a much longer list of about a thousand figures across six historical periods with their own time-period frames and cost colors. The rulebook is 90% there already, meaning others have been able to successfully read it and play independent of being shown how to play.

In a nutshell: roughly a thousand hours, self-funded, over a year. Real people, real art, real mechanics, actually playable and totally collectible.

This campaign's floor is $5,000, which funds the art and manufacturing of the Philosophers set. This first set will have a limited run with rare cards that you can only get by pledging at tiers where you get collectible booster packs. Each of these packs is totally randomized, with at least one rare foil in every pack. 

When I say this is the floor, that means there are a lot of other sets lined up: Literary Greats, Scientists, Mathematicians, Political leaders and History, not to mention theology, sociology, math, music, and art more broadly.

Each set gets its own dedicated artist(s) and style, and for the foreseeable future that artist will be Franklin, though we have a couple of new artists currently working on some special cards, not to mention a lot of others who have been sending in their portfolios (a true honor).

Important note: the game works, but the Philosophers set is a collectible release, not the complete game. A real randomized playable deck takes sixty unique cards drawn from across the whole canon: philosophers, but also literary greats, scientists, mathematicians, historians, and political figures. A booster box gives you plenty of cards, but they’re all from one 24-card set of Philosophers. That’s the first slice of the game, not the whole of it.

You can still play right away. Backers at the Study Group tier and up get the print-and-play kit, the same playtest cards we’ve been taking from city to city, and you can mix your Philosophers cards right in with them. That’s enough to get you going. The game won’t feel complete until the Literature, Science, Math, and History sets are out, though.

So this isn’t a Kickstarter for a game sitting at the readiness of Magic: The Gathering’s Alpha print. It’s a bootstrapping process. The design is done and playtested, and the Philosophers set is the first brick. Backing it is what makes the next sets possible, until the whole canon is in print and a sixty-card deck comes straight out of the boosters.

In the meantime, the Study Group tier and everything above it includes a print-and-play kit: printable versions of the playtest cards, the same ones that toured nine cities. Print them at home and you can play the whole game the day the files land, mixing your real cards in as the sets grow.

Concretely, the money does three things:

• Prints packs: real card stock, real foils, and real play boosters that have that classic TCG feel.
• Funds art: Franklin gets raises and royalties, and I get to bring on more artists and do more playtest events. The goal is to pay more than a living wage but to make this game a serious livelihood that enhances the quality of life for multiple artists.
• Raises visibility: a third of proceeds goes into advertising aimed at different demographics: college students, high school students, teachers, homeschoolers, philosophy and theory fans, booktube and bookstagram, and Magic players.

I say it is more so for the parents than their kids. Yes, I want kids to love this game, but that won't happen if it's assigned as homework. Instead, I hope kids grow up around their parents playing this game. That will cultivate the desire for the liberating arts more than assigning it to them. Kids want to do what the adults are doing.  

There is no "you should" play Canon: TCG. It is for people who want to read on their own time, who want to build something with the people around them, and who would rather spend a Friday night connecting with others over Plato and Shakespeare across a table than watching something they will not remember.

The cards exist. The rules are finished and free to read at canontcg.com/rules. The art is in progress and paid for. What remains is the most expensive part: original art and the first print run.