Children’s Card Game

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A children’s Card Game. The following pictures are a few examples of the many cards my brother, David, and I designed for fun in our childhood. We had started with a parody on the popular Pokémon franchise, using the name Dokémon, in which the D came from our surname Dorn.  After creating a good handful of Dokémon cards, we realized that Jokémon would have been a better choice name given that the cards were a joke version of  the Pokémon card game, but we had crossed the point of no return: we had laminated them. After literally creating hundreds of 3X5 Dokémon cards we moved on to more original card games.

David had the idea for this particular nameless game during a family vacation to Florida. The first card he created was that of the white cat Charm. It reads:

CHARM

You will have good luck until you see

a black cat cross your path or

if you get the bad luck card.

The use of the fractions as representation of the the card’s health and attack damage potential eludes both of us in the present day, but at the time of creating this game, we played one another effectively and understood it perfectly. [/ezcol_1half] Also, there is in fact a Black Cat card, but as to what luck entails, we do not know that either. The diamond and, later on, the star indicated the imagined rarity of the card. “Imagined,” because we only made one of each, so they are all equally rare. All one-of-a-kind.

At the time of creation, I had no interest in helping David use a heavy hand to marker in the index card, then lick and tear printer paper and fashion it into the base of the cards, only to then come up with a non-Pokémon like character and tidbit of information on the character.The fractions and cards suits looked complicated, and I was busy fearing for my life. For before returning to the hotel (where David crafted the first card on a letter desk near the front door) a pair of young men, with backwards baseball caps and driving a black truck, slid their thumbs across their necks while glaring at me. Stuck at the light with the two idling in the next lane,  I imagined they had plenty of time to memorize the rental car’s plates and general look. I trembled as they saw my dad pull into the Holiday inn. I didn’t swim, want to eat, or do anything that required leaving the safety of the room with the curtains drawn. And I didn’t feel like making cards with my life on the line, feeling like a fragile 1/1 in game statistics.

Eventually the fear passed and I did help created many of the hundred or so cards for the nameless game. As is clear looking at the difference from the the original Charm card, to the other, and finally the far more polished and partly computer manufactured Debris Shield card, we evolved the ascetics of the game as we went along, lightening the background and bettering the art.

A fully collection can be found at my brother’s site. Check out David Vincent Dorn’s portfolio here and see how much further he’s evolved his style beyond childhood card games.

Here are a few more:

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