The Big Name Game

Meet the A-Listers!

What do Cleopatra, Albert Einstein and Blackbeard have in common?

More than you might think.

A-Listers is a fast-paced card game featuring 100 of the most famous, fascinating and downright extraordinary people from history, brought to life with 100 beautiful, hand-drawn illustrations.

Your job? Find the connections, build your team of A-Listers, and collect the characters you need before your opponents do.

It’s quick to learn, fast to play and designed for everyone — whether you can name every Roman emperor in order or think the French Revolution had something to do with croissants.

100 people. 5,000 years of history.

The History 100 brings together an extraordinary cast from across the centuries.

Julius Caesar. Joan of Arc. Genghis Khan. Shakespeare. Marie Antoinette. Charles Darwin. Frida Kahlo. Muhammad Ali.

Kings and queens rub shoulders with scientists, artists, revolutionaries, explorers, criminals and eccentrics.

Every character is represented by a unique, full-body, hand-drawn illustration, packed with details inspired by their life and story.

And those details aren't just there to look pretty. They're part of the game.

Spot the connections! 

Every character belongs to different groups. Some connections are historical. Others are hiding in plain sight.

Can you collect a group of history's most famous revolutionaries? villains? glamour pusses? or ladies' men? 

Or perhaps your goal is assembly a squad of red-heads, men with moustaches, or better yet: wigs? 

The more you play, the more connections you start to discover.

That means children can play using the things they can see, while history buffs can start recognising connections based on the extraordinary lives behind the characters.

You don't need to know history to play. But you might know a lot more of it by the time you've finished.

We love history. But we know that not everybody loves memorising dates from a textbook. 

History without the homework.

We wanted to make a game that captures the thing that makes history genuinely entertaining: the people The geniuses. The tyrants. The adventurers. The artists. The troublemakers. The people who changed the world — and the people who made it considerably stranger.

The result is a game that introduces younger players to historical figures without feeling like an educational exercise, while giving adults and history enthusiasts plenty to recognise, debate and discover.

It's designed to be something kids can play with their parents, grandparents can play with their grandchildren, and history nerds can become worryingly competitive about.

Hand-drawn illustrations. 

At the heart of A-Listers is the cards themselves.

We're creating 100 original, hand-drawn character illustrations, each designed specifically for the game.

Every character has been researched and individually briefed, from their clothing and appearance to the objects they're carrying and the tiny visual details that connect them to other characters.

We want opening the box to feel like discovering a miniature illustrated gallery of world history... Albeit one containing everyone from Nefertiti to Napoleon and Buddha to The Beatles.

Why Kickstarter?

Creating 100 completely original illustrations is a big undertaking.

Kickstarter allows us to produce the game at the quality we want: commissioning professional artwork, manufacturing beautiful cards and packaging, and producing the game at a large enough scale to make it affordable.

The game is already well into development. We've been designing the characters, refining the groups and connections, testing the gameplay and working with professional illustrators to establish the final visual style.

Your support will allow us to take those designs through final illustration, production and manufacturing, and turn A-Listers into a real game.

Who are we?

We're Brickwork, a small independent history publisher based in the UK.

We make games and videos about history because we think the past is at its best when it's colourful, surprising and fun.

Our previous historical board game, The Terror: Paris, 1793, was successfully funded on Kickstarter, raising over $100,000 from backers around the world.

The History 100 is something rather different: faster, lighter and designed for a much wider range of ages.

But it's built around the same idea:

History shouldn't be boring.

With your help, we're going to put 100 of history's most extraordinary characters into one box... And let you sort them out.