Silicon Valley’s startup guru has designed a card game to combat his least favorite presidential candidate through humor.



Reid Hoffman and his team try their hand at Trumped Up Cards. Last January, Reid Hoffman decided to make a game for his friends. He gathered a small group of the people who work for him — not at LinkedIn, mind you, or at the venture firm Greylock where he is a partner, but for Hoffman himself — and they started to brainstorm. “I’d been wanting to do a card game for a while, and it was like, ‘Well, should we do it around Trump?’” he says. “And the answer was: YES. Let’s do this.”

He figured that if Trump didn’t win the nomination, his game would be a fun souvenir for Hoffman’s tribe of pals. But if Trump did become the GOP nominee, the game could become a useful piece of political satire and an entertaining method for educating the general public, Daily Show style. Nine months later, Hoffman’s game has become a reality, and as the countdown to the election shortens, he’s making it available to the public. For $20.16, you, too, can play “Trumped Up Cards.”

“If we’re going to decide that the primary qualifications for president are strong success on a reality television show and some brand licensing,” says Hoffman, “and not foreign policy or a history of public service or transparency or even detail-formulated policies about what you’re planning on doing, well, then we should create some kind of product that illustrates the absurdity of all that.”

Every election has its campaign memorabilia. Consider the iconic James Cox/Franklin Roosevelt “Americanize America” presidential campaign button. The more rare it is, the more valuable it becomes. If you happened to keep the antique car-themed pin given to guests at a 1980 Reagan/Bush dinner in Indiana, you could probably sell it for $500. Silicon Valley has its own strain of keepsakes. You can often spot early investors in Airbnb, for example, because they have a box of “Obama O’s” or “Cap’n McCain’s” on their shelves—in 2008, Airbnb (then still called AirBed & Breakfast) produced 500 of each for its hosts to order and serve for breakfast.

History may judge the 2016 election memorabilia particularly rich. And while #ImWithHer pins or Feel The Bern T-shirts make decent mementos, they’re not as flashy as some of the products that have been manufactured to mark Trump’s campaign. Some of the best of it comes from opponents: Trumped Up Cards is clearly not something the Trump campaign would endorse.

Hoffman’s project is a multiplayer game that will look familiar to any one who has ever landed in a living room among a gaggle of pals, pairing cards for the wittiest combination in a game like, say, Apples to Apples. The player with the greatest net worth (you don’t have to offer proof; just assert it the loudest) goes first, taking a turn as the card evaluating officer (CEO). The CEO chooses a blue card from the deck and reads it out loud. (Ex: “According to Trump, the government can take away your home, but not your guns or ___________.”) Participants respond with a white card, printed with a series of readymade answers. (Ex: “Glamping with Muammar Gaddafi; Annual ‘Undocumented Gardeners’ hunt on the White House Lawn.”) In other words, as the website points out, “It’s sort of like a standard White House press briefing.”



Several of the deck’s “Trump Cards.”There’s a third type of card: the Trump Card , of which there are 40 in the box. These can be played in combination with a standard White Card. For example, the one marked “Play the woman card!” allows a player to dismiss any female player’s answer during a hand for no good reason at all. Oh, and you can break the rules at any time as long as you persuade a majority of the players that what you’re doing “will help make America a more amazing place to live than China, Mexico, or even Japan!”

Each of the blue cards has one of four letters at the bottom, and a player wins when she has collected enough cards to spell V-O-T-E. However, those letters also spell V-E-T-O, and if the rest of the players can together create that word, they can block the winner. (This is called the “D.C. gridlock” variation.) Oh, but this could go on forever, you say? Well, for the lightweight players, according to the instructions: “The game ends when the majority of the players grow so depressed at the prospect of a real Trump presidency that they just start quietly sobbing.”

Of course, the goal is greater than humor. The game is just one effort among many that he has made to support Clinton, and it’s likely that his early public endorsement, his political contributions, and his recent pledge to give $5 million to veterans’ groups if Trump agrees to release his tax returns may have a far greater impact on voters. But with plenty of facts about Trump’s personal character and political career tucked into footnotes on the cards, the game serves to further educate its players. “My hope is is to have this card game be something that causes people to reflect on the nature of this electoral cycle and the nature of Trump as a candidate,” says Hoffman. His co-conspirators in the game’s creation include David Sanford, Greg Beato, Ian Alas, Jessica Johnston, Eric Strenger, all of whom work in his office.

Hoffman himself is an outspoken Clinton supporter. “There’s never been a candidate who is better prepared for office, maybe ever, in American history,” he says. “She believes in coalition. Given the nature of the train wreck of partisanship, this is going to be extremely important for the future. And people then cast dispersions, asking, ‘is she sufficiently business?’ Well, she’s come out to Silicon Valley and met with me amongst others.”

Beyond simply supporting Clinton, however, Hoffman believes a Trump presidency would be dangerous to society, and he’s attempting to use the strength of his personal credibility as one of Silicon Valley’s most respected startup gurus to spread that message. Says Hoffman: “[Trump] describes himself as a dealmaker, but when you go back to other people he’s made deals with and you look at their quotes and everything else, there’s a lot of disregard and dismay.” Hoffman adds, “The business of America is business, but it’s about high-integrity business. It’s about a business where you keep your word, where you make square deals.”

Hoffman doesn’t trust the polls to reveal how the elections may turn out. “You saw Brexit happen,” he says, referring to the June 23 referendum in which British citizens voted to exit the European Union. “Our polling methodology has gotten outdated and, in fact, it’s not really telling us what it needs to be telling us.”

He hopes the game will galvanize support for Clinton while bringing discussion of Trump — not as the larger-than-life reality TV star, but as the political candidate who is vying to govern our country — into living rooms across the country. (“America First,” according to the FAQ, but interested international buyers can email Hoffman’s team to make their case for ownership.) The profits, Hoffman tells me, will be donated to charities that “already work to make America great.”

Photos by Eric Millette.