Here’s what happened when the Iowa caucuses and a viral political card game collided

Santorum's staff barred the door. Sanders and Carson's people loved it.

Presidential campaigns are notoriously unpredictable affairs, but staffers at the 2016 candidates’ Iowa campaign offices probably didn’t expect the creators of a viral, election-themed card game to show up and drop off free copies of their product. It was understandable, then, that the two men who created The Contender—which plays like Cards Against Humanity for political debates and raised nearly $150,000 on Kickstarter—encountered a mix of enthusiasm, skepticism, celebrity status, and brusque dismissal as they visited campaign after campaign in Des Moines, Iowa, over the past few days. “The baseline, which we pretty much got from Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Donald Trump, Mike Huckabee…was just, ‘Hey man, that’s really cool, we’re really excited, thank you so much, we’ll pass this on to the volunteers when they’re not on the phone banks or when they’re done doing their lunch. This will be great. They’ll love it,’” Justin Robert Young, who created the game with his friend John Teasdale, told the Daily Dot. “And then we had the really, really goods, and the really, really weirds.” Bernie Sanders‘s office was a clear highlight. “We walk in, it’s this super-young crowd, everybody’s very chilled-out but, certainly, intense about the cause,” Young said. “We’re chilling out in the lobby talking to people about [The Contender], and all of a sudden, I realize that the person who’s very interested in the game is Justin Long, the actor of former ‘I’m a Mac/I’m a PC’ fame.” [Placeholder for https://www.facebook.com/TheContenderGame/photos/a.1484252965219756.1073741828.1481985028779883/1546271029017949/?type=3 embed.]

The Contender team visited every Iowa campaign headquarters, leaving copies of their game with staffers for every candidate except former HP CEO Carly Fiorina and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who do not have offices in the state. (Fiorina’s Super PAC did set up shop in Iowa, but as Young put it, “We’re not giving ’em to Super PACs.”) Sanders’ team was the only one to invite them in beyond the lobby.

“Part of it was because they were about to have a big press scrum for Bernie,” Young said. “Bernie actually came in and talked to the press while we were there. But they were just so nice and so welcoming and such a great hang.”

“But even then,” he continued, “I think Ben Carson’s campaign gets the edge.”

Every time they arrived at a campaign office, they had to first explain that they were neither selling something nor reporting for a news outlet. After that, Young said, staffers and volunteers at almost every office “kind of warmed up.” But among Carson’s people, something special happened.

“At the point that they warmed up at the Ben Carson campaign, we immediately became the celebrities,” Young said. “They were so nice. The dude we were talking to was like, ‘Oh wow, you guys are inventors! Can I get my picture with you?’ And so we stood up, and we just took pictures with their staff. It was amazing. We walked out feeling so good about ourselves.”

Things didn’t go so well when Young and Teasdale visited Rick Santorum‘s office. “It’s not necessarily surprising,” Young said, “and it’s partially our fault.” The two donned what they called “crazy old coot” hats, which Young described as “a mesh trucker cap that we just put all of our pins in. The standard picture you’d see in a stock photo of a rally [of an] older gentleman sitting in a lawn chair with a sign and a hat.”

Campaign workers “basically barred us from the door.” A “very terse” staffer took the card game and shooed them away almost immediately. “Like vampires,” Young said, “we were denied passing the threshold into the Rick Santorum office.”

Young understood their concerns. “For Rick Santorum, how often does [he get] the setup ‘Anyway, these two young guys with silly hats and cameras walked in, and it was great!’ I assume for them, it’s like, ‘Which one of you’s going to pull down your pants, and which one of you’s going to throw glitter?’”