Chris Gadd

cgadd@dicksonherald.com

Robert Hay and his wife Phallen didn’t set out to create a card game and ruin friendships, though they certainly enjoyed doing both.

The wrecked friendship thing might be an overstatement — the smiles while playing NUKED, the game that the Hays invented, is a giveaway. Still, the game’s slogan is “Ruining Friendships One Game at a Time,” so you decide.

Robert Hay, a nearly lifelong Dickson resident, describes their invention, NUKED, like this:

A game for 2-8 players that pits a player’s post-apocalyptic settlement against other players’ settlements with each trying to collect enough settlers to win. Also, cards can be played to ruin other settlements, or protect your own.

Hay had a few prototype boxes made. His mother and brother received one.

Their dog ate another.

“That was heartbreaking,” Hay said.

The few other sets were played among the Hays friends and relatives. They had fun, he said, and during those times when a player’s settlement is wiped out, the come back with little motivation for winning.

“They are strictly out for blood and revenge,” Hay said.

Hay created a Kickstarter funding campaign online with a goal of $8,000. As with all Kickstarter campaigns, if they don’t reach that amount, they get nothing. The “backer” amounts range from a dollar to $25 with a reward being a boxed set of the game.

How we got NUKED

The Hays love games, mainly of the board and video variety. That’s how NUKED happened.

“We were playing an old game and we didn’t have the instructions,” Hay said. “So, we basically made up the game as we were playing with these cards.”

“The more we played it, we were like, ‘This is really fun,’” Hay added. “It was one of those things where the more people who played it, the more people liked it.”

Over the next eight months, they worked on the mechanics of the game while he stressed over the design, first hand-drawing the cards before finishing the computer design.

“This would not happen without (Phallen). Otherwise, I would be chasing my tail somewhere worrying about designing it exactly right,” Hay said. “She said, ‘Let’s worry about making it fun before we make it beautiful.’”

He said the game doesn’t have a lot of stats.

“It's more like paper rock scissors,” said Hay, who is a graphic designer at Dickson Graphics. “You can pair up and play in teams, or in teams versus single players.”

He said a game among a small group is about 30 minutes. Larger groups, adults and children, can stretch out for hours.

So, how did the post-apocalyptic theme emerge?

Hay said he always enjoyed that movie genre, citing the Mad Max films and other 80s-era, end-of-civilization movies.

Growing up during Cold War, Hay recalls that the big fear was being “nuked.”

“Nuking does come into play. It’s one of the cards,” he said.

The future

Hay said the $8,000 Kickstarter number was reached by calculating the production costs, taxes, shipping and “a small amount that we sell afterward, hopefully” after the reward sets are shipped out. So far they have reached nearly 40 percent of their goal with 11 days left.

If the game is launched, he said they would likely sell online and in a few of the brick and mortar stores that are interested.

Hay said NUKED is easy enough for family playing and fun enough to “keep a bunch of touch screen junkies engaged” while also being small enough to “fit in a pocket or a purse.”

And he hopes the game will make you “want to not just win, but destroy everyone else.”