Politricks: PH traditional politics in a card game

Want another way to analyze aspiring politicians and their behavior in dealing with political issues on a daily basis?

Try Politricks, a new card game created by two Filipinos in time for the presidential elections in May this year.

PJ Lim and RB Ting, the creators of Politricks, told INQUIRER.net in an e-mail interview that the new card game is drawn from current events and personalities in Philippine politics.

The card game consists of 104 deck cards of different stereotypes of ‘trapos’, or traditional politicians, and soap opera events that happened in the Philippines’ political timeline through the years.  

Lim and Ting said the idea to create the card game came when their friends from Japan and Singapore started asking them about the scope and nature of Philippine politics. They added that they designed the card game to explain it in the simplest way possible. 

Lim explained that with the use of the card game, it will be easier for people to grasp the essence of the country’s political fiasco. “Everything that is in the game happened in real life but we take a comedic angle to it, in a light-hearted manner to make fun of a heavy topic,” he elaborated in an interview via e-mail.

For instance, one of the cards that stood out in the deck was the Pork Barrel Scam card, which refers to the controversial P10 billion Pork Barrel Scam allegedly masterminded by Janet Lim-Napoles.

Lim explained: “For example, our Pork Barrel Scam card, [it’s a heavy topic, pero] we make fun out of it by making it really literal definition of the politician inside a pork barrel surrounded by pigs”. When a player has this card, it allows him to siphon off money from the game deck and take them all for his personal gains.

Lim said the card game best suits the millennials, as the youths are enticed to be political through social media platforms. Lim also mentioned that millennials comprehend issues more through interactive discussions with a group of people rather than sitting down and listening to a boring academic lecture.

The Politicks’ masterminds said they aspire to create for Filipinos a card game depicting decades of realities in the government. “What inspired us is really because we feel that we want to educate, yet at the same time entertain the masses, and the easiest medium to communicate this message is through card games,” Lim asserted.

Also, minimal yet interesting details are noticeable in the card game. The money cards contain classifications such as pang-yosi (cigarette allowance), pang-kape (coffee allowance), and pang-meryenda (snack allowance), thus cramping up the to-do list of unavoidable habits of Filipino politicians. 

With 104 assorted cards in the Politricks deck, it will be easy for players to remember all 104 things that is horribly wrong with Philippine politics.

The creators of the newly-marketed card yearns to teach one valuable lesson to the voter population –  understanding the core of Philippine politics makes a voter wiser and principled.