SaintCards

SaintCards is an educational card game designed by the American Catholic convert David Williams to teach players about Christian saints, the liturgical year, history and art, primarily from a Catholic perspective.
Development and Growth
Williams was prompted to create the game when his wife commented upon how he had been learning a significant amount about the saints but had not taught anything about the subject to their children.
In early 2018, Williams ran a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the production of SaintCards. Subsequently, the prototypical cards were slightly redesigned before the 2018 SaintCards Deluxe Starter Set was released. The most notable changes between the prototype and the publicly released base set were the shape of the fact ribbons and the introduction of a geographical component at the base of each card, the latter of which substantially increased the number of possible matches between different cards.
The original rules were slightly expanded in 2019 with the release of the second, smaller base deck. Along with some new matchable categories, the latter deck also introduced rules for a new game variation called Run the Race! however it does not include a storage container as the original base set did.
In May and June 2019, the game was promoted at the Minnesota Catholic Home Education Conference.
Game Play
The game begins with the dealer dealing a fixed number of cards to each player. The number of cards varies depending on the number of players. The remainder of the deck is placed face down to form the draw pile with the top card turned face up next to it to start the play pile.
In turn, each player aims to match at least one attribute of a card in his or her hand with an attribute of the top card in play. Players gain treasures (also called jewels) which are collected from the Storehouse of Treasure, with each additional matching attribute earning a player an additional treasure. Treasures take the physical form of game pieces of varying size and colour, each corresponding to a different value and so function as the point scoring system for the game. On a single turn, a player may play a second card only if at least 3 matches between it and the card previously played can be identified.
Alternatively, or if a player is unable to find any matches, that player may draw a card from the draw pile instead.
Play moves to the next player in turn once a player says pass.
The game ends after one player has played his or her final card and the dealer has had a final chance to play. The player who has gathered the most treasure is the winner. That player then collects all the other players' treasures and lays them at the feet of Jesus, i.e. next to the Jesus Card.
Matchable Attributes
The rules sheet includes multiple lists of matchable attributes organised into categories.
Expansions
The original base set includes a few cards with markings belonging to categories which are part of expansion sets, however the rules for what effect those cards have are only contained in each expansion set. Nonetheless, these symbols are still matchable attributes even in the original base set.
The SaintCards Expansions listed on the original rules
A new treasure piece called amethyst (worth 50 treasures) was initially released as part of this expansion.
Historia Cards
Historia Cards, a related game with a non-religious focus upon history, has also been released. It can be played either independently or incorporated into the original SaintCards game.
The Historia Cards base set includes its own specialised rules for play, however they are largely similar to the original SaintCards rules. In addition to the Geography Facts of SaintCards, it also includes a variety of other Facts categories which players may use for matching, however some sets of facts are peculiar to a particular Main Category (e.g. Architecture, Conflict, Document, etc.).

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See Also

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