Then I find out that making a game means making a lot of games. Or making a game a bunch of times. Moving things from idea to thing you can hold in your hands? It means a lot of paper. You know how you’re always hearing the youth of American saying the popular expression, “Now that’s paper!” Here’s why.

You think up a game and it needs cards. Cards are paper. Games are paper. People are paper. Except people aren’t paper, they’re weird sacks of bonemeat and beefcups and stinkwater, but thanks for going with me on this. Now that’s paper.

We wanted to play and see how the game was. So we made Medium: Mark 1. It’s the first version of Medium (the eventual worldwide success that everyone knows about) and it’s made out index cards and Sharpie. Danielle made half the cards (the ones that look good, below) and I made the other half (the sucky-looking ones, not pictured) and it worked just fine. Look at these dope-ass cards. CHEESE ASTRONAUT!!!

Good god they looked good. Look at them! And those were just the Medium cards. Look at this setup that has the Lightning Bolt cards and scoring tokens. They look rad, too! HIPPO!!!

And this worked great. We played just the three of us. One time we played with Chris. We played our first 6-player game with Connor and Eric and Chris and Carrie. And we split up the cards and took it to our homes and we played it with our spouses and friends and parents and children! And they loved it too!

And it was all nice.

We played the game and we laughed and high-fived the butts out of one another and had the greatest time and everyone loved it. But then we realized we needed something more. Something that felt real.

Because we remembered that cards should look like cards and tokens should feel like tokens. So I looked it up online and saw there’s a bunch of ways to make cards, but I wanted the easiest one (tbh I’m not super good at doing things). Here’s the ingredients:

Card sleeves, like you use for Magic: The Gathering cards, ya nerd.

12 decks of standard poker cards.

1-inch cardboard tokens (that turned out to be way too small).

1-inch round stickers.

A paper slicer thing that you stole from your 11-year-old daughter

The box from the Machi Koro Harbor expansion.

Like 100 pages of printouts that are free when you print them at work! NOW THAT’S PAPER BABYEEEEE.

And so look at this. Medium: Mark 2. I can’t believe I said the index card ones were “dope-ass” or that the scoring tokens looked “rad” when obviously they look like a gallon-and-a-half of dogbarf compared to these beauties:

And y’all guys like looking at cards?

Now that’s a bread jungle wing violin trip screen you can take to the bank. LIGHTNING BOLT CARD!!!