Please support the Nuclear Poker PLAYA EDITION 2014 fundraiser for the Nuclear Poker Hexa-Bunker. Full details below!

Nuclear Poker is a card game designed to teach you how to think about nuclear war. Nuclear Poker is a card game design to have fast-to-play, fun, five minute rounds containing hysterical laughter, bellicose posturing and extravagant gestures. Nuclear Poker is as much satire as strategy: a mocking school teacher for a post-modern world that has forgotten itself and its reality. You should buy Nuclear Poker, so we can fully realize our wicked cool art project!

They are still there, sleeping in the silos

So let me tell you about the game. Ian Willey did the magnificently chilling art, and I, leashless did the majority of the rules (pdf). There’s some talk of playing it with defence bureaucrats who’re too young to really have a feel for the cold war. It’s a great conference game. The “take a stiff drink every time you get nuked” variant has great potential. It’s a fun game.

We’re releasing the PLAYA EDITION now, in time for Burning Man (order quick!) and to kickstart our Electromagnetic Field 2014 project, The Nuclear Poker Hexa-Bunker which is a half-scale quad dome filled with ominous things and military surplus hats and uniform fragments. Right now we’re at $500 of $2000, $2000 which will buy quite a nice production with, of course, various options for “it’ll do” along the way if we can’t quite clear the full whack. Not that that’s going to be any issue, of course, because you’re going to help us, right?

Lost in thought

What we’d really like [stretch goal announcement music!] is enough spare money in the Nuclear Poker Project kitty to take the game to peace and strategy conferences alike, to teach a whole new generation of people about the realities of MAD, détente and all those other scary old terms from the Cold War That Never Ended (Ukraine!).

There are three versions of the game, with a few fun little extras to get you through the cold, dark night.

Buy DEFCON 1 ($100 incl. $60 donation)
+ EMERGENCY KITTENS and PRIORITY BUNKER PASS and more

Buy DEFCON 2 ($50 incl. $15 donation)
+ customizable cards

Buy DEFCON 3 ($25 cash on the barrel head)
+ the infamous, possibly illegal in some jurisdictions, Nuclear Poker Jokers

Yes, all these games play exactly the same way, but don’t you want emergency kittens? Don’t you love them? Don’t you want to give us a whole $60 donation so we can realize our dreams and stuff?

Buy nuclear poker. Get the EMERGENCY KITTENS edition because you deserve it.

The Nuclear Poker team in no way endorse nuclear war, or the planning and strategizing of nuclear wars using our game.