Decks
Eighteen decks in the box. Room for yours.
Every shipped deck exists in English and German, holds 24 to 64 cards with two to six numeric attributes, and carries a documented source for every attribute — so “where does this number come from?” has an answer. Two of them go further and ship a full methodology paper, because they had to.
Market Movers — Stock Company Clash
Listed companies students actually know — market cap against revenue, headcount and five-year performance.
World Tour — Country Clash
Area, population density, GDP per person, coast per 1,000 km² and neighbours. Two of the five are ratios, so the biggest country is not the strongest card.
Wild Kingdom — Animal Clash
From the blue whale to the honey bee: weight, top speed, lifespan, offspring — and heartbeats per lifetime, where the hummingbird beats the whale thirteen times over.
Element Masters — Chemistry Clash
Atomic number, melting point, density, year of discovery and abundance in the earth’s crust.
Eureka! — Invention Clash
Fire to smartphone — when it was invented, how many people use it, how long it took to spread.
Masterpieces — Creator Clash
Painters, composers, writers and film-makers by era, career length, record value and works per year — Warhol 257, Leonardo 0.4.
Grocery Games — Nutrition Clash
Everyday foods per 100 g: energy, protein, fibre — and sugar and fat, where the lower value wins.
Cosmic Clash — Space Objects
Planets, moons, dwarf planets and stars by diameter, mass, gravity, temperature and discovery date.
Way to Go — Transport Clash
Walking to private jet, scored on CO₂ per passenger-kilometre, speed, capacity, cost and convenience.
Source Check — Media Literacy Clash
Source archetypes — from peer-reviewed paper to rumour — on expertise, fact-checking, transparency and reach.
Where the Money Goes — The Investment Universe
Everything you can do with money you do not spend, from a coin for a busker to a leveraged certificate — on expected value, real-terms loss risk, availability, cost clarity, effort and protection.
Bad Bets — Traps for Your Money
Ways to be parted from your money, sorted into fraud, manipulation and fair-but-losing bets. Every card names the mental shortcut the practice exploits.
Everyday Measures
A balloon against a weight plate: mass, length, volume, price and number of parts. Built so a light card can still win — only one card in thirty-two is unplayable.
What’s Inside: Fruit & Veg
Fruit and vegetables on energy, sugar, vitamin C, fibre and season length. Lower sugar wins.
Garden Birds of Germany
The species you can actually see from the window — weight, wingspan, clutch size, migration distance and how many turn up in an average garden.
German Cities
German cities chosen for play rather than for size: inhabitants, area, density, elevation and the year they were first written down.
Careers Head-to-Head — German Apprenticeships
German apprenticeships on training length, skilled-worker pay, places per 100 seekers, intake per year — and the share of tasks a machine could do, where the lower value wins.
Power Plants — Energy on the Grid
Ways to make electricity on CO₂, full-load hours, cost per megawatt-hour, capacity and how fast they can ramp up. CO₂ and cost win low.
Anatomy of a card
Six things, and none of them decoration.
- Group — a cosmetic category that colours the card, so a deck reads as a set rather than a list. Optional.
- Emoji and name — the thing itself. Big enough to recognise across a classroom.
- Subtitle — the one clarifying line. “Per 100 g”, a country, a year.
- Attributes — two to six numeric values with units and a direction. Mark a category lower wins and prices, emissions and reaction times behave correctly.
- Values — formatted with the right decimals and unit, so learners compare like with like.
- Did you know? — one fact per card. This is where the teaching hides.
The card below is rendered from real shipped data, with the same layout the game uses.
Cheetah
Wild Kingdom — Animal Clash
- ⚖️ Weight60.00 kg
- 💨 Top speed110.00 km/h
- 🎂 Lifespan12.0 years
- ❤️ Heartbeats per lifetime0.76 billion
- 🍼 Offspring per year3.0
Did you know?From 0 to 100 km/h in three seconds — faster than most sports cars.
Your own data
From spreadsheet to playable deck.
Export your sheet as CSV and import it. The header row does all the work: five reserved column names describe the card, everything else becomes an attribute.
The reserved columns
| Column | What it is |
|---|---|
| name | The card name. The only required column. |
| subtitle | Optional second line. |
| icon | An emoji used as the card logo. |
| group | Group name. New groups are created automatically. |
| fact | The did-you-know line. |
Attribute columns
Name the column after the attribute. To set more than the label, append the settings with pipes — Label|direction|unit|decimals:
name,group,fact,Top speed|high|km/h|0,CO₂|low|g/km|0
Bicycle,Active,Beats a car in city traffic.,25,0
City bus,Public,Full buses are hard to beat.,70,68
Petrol car,Private,One person per car is the problem.,180,143direction is high (the default) or low. Values take a point or a comma as the decimal separator, and understand grouped thousands.
Importing into a deck that already exists
Columns are matched to your existing attributes by shortname or by label, and you choose what happens to the cards already there:
Add all rows as new cards
The existing cards stay untouched. Good for extending a deck.
Update cards with the same name
The round trip: export the deck, fix the numbers in Excel, import it back. Rows that match a card name overwrite it; the rest are added.
Replace all cards
Wipes the deck and imports fresh. Blocked once games have been played with the deck, so recorded results stay meaningful.
Nothing is written until you confirm. The preview shows the target deck, the detected attributes, how many cards would be created, updated or deleted, and the first ten cards with their parsed values. If anything is wrong, you get the line number — and the import does not run at all.
Two decks that argue with themselves
The finance pair.
Money is where a card game about data earns its keep — and where the numbers are hardest to defend. These two ship with a methodology paper each, because without one they could not be checked.
💶 Where the Money Goes
54 cards · financial literacy · Wohin mit dem Geld in German
Everything you can do with money you do not spend, in one deck: a coin for a busker, a fixed deposit, a rented flat, a lottery ticket, a leveraged certificate. All 54 measured on the same six rulers.
The lesson is not which one wins. It is that nothing wins on all six — and that the options which feel safest lose purchasing power almost by definition. Cash in a drawer scores 100 % real-terms loss risk, because with any inflation at all it is a certainty rather than a risk.
🎭 Bad Bets
41 cards · financial literacy · Schlechte Wetten in German
Forty-one ways to be parted from your money, grouped by the question learners actually ask: is this a crime, a manipulation, or just a game I was always going to lose?
Every card names the mental shortcut the practice exploits — anchoring on a crossed-out price, reciprocity after a free lunch, the near miss on a scratch card. A learner who can name the mechanism can see the next one coming.
What these decks do not claim. Both label every figure as either derived from published rules, a convention we defined, or an estimate to argue with. No crime statistic and no market measurement is presented as a fact. The money deck contains no product, no forecast and no advice — and says so on the deck itself.
On the numbers
Game data, honestly labelled.
A card game needs values that are comparable and memorable. That means rounding, and rounding means judgement calls. We document ours instead of hiding them.
Sourced per attribute
Each shipped deck documents where each attribute comes from and how to verify it — UN and World Bank figures, standard chemistry references, food-composition tables, published emissions factors.
Rounded on purpose
Values are curated and rounded so comparisons stay readable and ties stay rare. They are game data, not reference data — and we say so in the documentation rather than in a footnote nobody reads.
Some scores are arguments
The media-literacy deck scores source types on transparency and independence. Those numbers are defensible, not objective — and the classroom argument about whether they are right is the most valuable part of the deck.
Deck quality
A deck can be accurate and still be a bad game.
Correct numbers are the easy half. The hard half is whether a hand is worth playing — and that is a property you can measure.
The failure nobody names
If every attribute measures roughly the same thing — a big country has a big area, a long coast and many people — then one card beats another on all of them. Whoever draws the loser can do nothing with it. No attribute, no chance, no bluff. A deck full of those cards is a ranking with extra steps.
So we measure it
Every deck is scored on three numbers before it ships: the share of cards that can never win, whether two attributes secretly rank the cards the same way, and the gap between the weakest and the strongest card. New decks have to clear all three.
The fix is usually a ratio
Swapping a total for a per-something figure costs no new data and makes a small card able to beat a large one. It is also the better thing to teach.
🌍 World Tour
Population became population density, coastline became coast per 1,000 km². Canada and Australia both show 4 — although Canada has 13 million more people. Japan reaches 78.8, Switzerland 0.0.
Unplayable cards: 42 % → 12 %
🦁 Wild Kingdom
Resting heart rate became heartbeats per lifetime. The hummingbird weighs 28 million times less than the blue whale and still gets thirteen times as many. The elephant lands on 1.10 billion.
Unplayable cards: 46 % → 25 %
🥑 Grocery Games
Fat now wins with the lower number — the honest reading of a nutrition deck, and the single most valuable change we have made to any deck. One field, no value touched.
Unplayable cards: 83 % → 38 %
We publish the ones that still fail
Thirteen of the eighteen decks do not yet clear all three thresholds — including the two finance decks that took the most work, which are also the two that fail hardest. The measurements for every deck, passing or not, are in the plugin’s deck audit, together with what each remaining fix would cost. A catalogue that only showed the good numbers would not be worth much to you.
The audit also records where we declined to change a value because we could not verify it from a source at the time of the change.
Next step
Bring us a spreadsheet. We’ll bring the cards.
Tell us who is learning and what they should be able to feel by the end. We’ll tell you which route gets you there fastest.