Manifesto

It’s my money and I want it now!

The true dream of personal finance is “no strings attached.” Card v Card enables all players to experience in microcosm the dream of expense account living: a vaguely bottomless supply of ambiguous dark money. Spending your own money feels bad. Spending someone else's money feels good. It’s not your money, therefore spend it at will. Card V Card is vicarious financial indiscretion, a tailor-made vehicle for purchases that are nothing but impulse. The game rewards lack of planning, reaction time, and gut instinct.

In “real life,” or more accurately in the inescapable reality of 21st century finance, credit cards are inherently predatory. American Express is dying to layer gamification upon gamification until the credit card itself is all but invisible: cash back, points, frequent flier miles, lounge access, industry-specific rewards. Spending becomes a min-max mobile-app nightmare game to the obscurity of its actual mechanisms. The core of the premise is this: if your every purchase makes a set of 6 auxiliary numbers go UP, perhaps you will forget that the main number (your bank balance) is going DOWN.

Card v Card fulfills the promised allure of Credit Card America without the dire back-end ramifications of the fine print. An unmarked credit card tied to someone else’s money is pure extractivism, with no thought towards origins or consequences.

Card v Card is Greed: The Game. What you have here is a finite pool of resources available with one simple condition - that you conduct a certain kind of gut calculus: who else is spending the money, how fast, and how do you get yours as efficiently as possible? On the other side of the scale you have merely the weight of social awkwardness: the indistinct, watery, and somehow gut-melting fear of having your credit card declined in public.