Opus-Dei: The Atheist Card Game

Who knew atheists had their own card game?

Unfortunate name, considering we’re all reminded of the Catholic cult, but it looks interesting enough…

Opus-Dei: Existence After Religion™, is a new entertaining and irreverent card game that takes place in a universe where religion is almost completely something of the past. In this world without religious dogma, the players represent rival “Zeitgeists” (German, Time-Spirits) competing in a battle of rational ideas to maintain ethics, morals and meaningful lives for all by virtue of reason!

When playing the game, a queue of potentially existing philosophers, scientists and fools are lined up for each round. These humans are worth varying amounts of points, according to their intellectual status and magnitude. It is then up to each Zeitgeist, in their turn, to create the best of them into their particular World by playing up to two cards that can serve their best interests. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins!

(via The Barefoot Bum)

Porky Pine

After reading the directions, the game sounds really unnecessarily difficult and I don’t really understand why it should really be considered a “Atheist” card game other than the fact that it features famous atheists in it.
NYCatheist

More info here:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/41757

It also says “The publishers are currently in legal struggles with the catholic organisation “Prelatura del Opus Dei” over the right to use the term “Opus Dei”.”
Brian Westley

Another interesting game is Credo:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1304

Players represent different Christian factions at the council of Nicea, trying to avoid losing followers as they fight over which beliefs are the true church.
dfledermaus

I’m just waiting for the people who brought us SimCity to come up with a SimReligion game. Each player could start with a single prophet, savior or avatar and compete against other religions for followers and eventual world domination.

I think it would be fun to play as a savior; maybe someone who died for our sims…

🙂
Jack

Um, don’t have much to say except that translating zeitgeists as “time-spirits” is terribly prone to misinterpretation. So much so that I’m not sure who ever wrote the blurb knows what they’re talking about. Zeitgeist means something like spirit of the times, the mimetic environment that defines some period of time. When I hear “time-spirit” I think the Ghost of Christmas Past.
medussa

I’ll buy SimReligion as soon as it comes out!
Vincent

So far the “legal trouble” consists in an opposition in the Danish trademark office to registration of the name.
I think OD will lose because they don’t sell cards in Denmark. In fact they don’t do anything in Denmark. The guys who made the game said they were shocked because they didn’t know OD was a real group. They thought Dan Brown made it up for his novel.