Expos are so much better with this deck-building business card game

Your de facto business card is a no-frills presentation of your name and number and Twitter handle, so potential business partners can contact you later on. But if you are a game designer among an expo of game designers, it might be advantageous to flaunt your chops by designing an entire game that fits on a 1.5×3″ piece of paper.

That’s what Manuel Correia decided to do for EGX Rezzed, as he blogged about on Gamasutra today. The difficulty was how to make a fun game whose instructions were straightforward enough to fit on a card and that could be played with items that someone always has on them. So he craftily devised a card-fighting, deck-building game out of—what else—business cards. It’s kind of a coffee-table-book-about-coffee-tables sort of thing.

It works by assigning special attributes to business cards with certain characteristics, such as if they having rounded edges or a white background. And it plays out in a quick game of card-laying strategy, which you can glean by squinting at the card in the above snapshot. It sure has my self-printed Averys beat.