this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
65 points (100.0% liked)

Games

21195 readers
201 users here now

Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.

Rules

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Most cards are here, some real bangers in there. Some really dated cards too, like Imelda Marcos. Some are still current today. Some great meme material if anyone wants to go mining. https://archive.org/details/illuminati_card_game/

top 28 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] RedWizard@hexbear.net 21 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

"Violent, Government" sounds about right.

"Violent" Hmm.

Hell Yeah! fidel-cool

the-pigs Thumbworld.

[–] replaceable@hexbear.net 34 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Don't you know liberal=commie, and even though liberals openly hates any leftist ideas I can't comprehend it because I am illiterate and reading comprehension is a cultural marxism ploy?

[–] miz@hexbear.net 12 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

didn't know Steve Jackson ~~was~~ is an ultra

EDIT: still alive at 73!

[–] Owl@hexbear.net 8 points 3 days ago

The art on that NATO pic is sending me.

[–] KoloradoKoolAid75@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Why does the Mossad agent packs some milkers? Is this another attempt of IDF to get people volunteer?

[–] RedWizard@hexbear.net 9 points 3 days ago

It worked on Ethan Klein, he's an IDF soldier at heart.

[–] xijinpingist@hexbear.net 17 points 3 days ago

Some of the far right cards are really funny. Black helicopters, Thousand points of light, BATF wow, really brings me back.

[–] replaceable@hexbear.net 14 points 3 days ago (2 children)
[–] TRI_STATE_GLADIO@hexbear.net 9 points 3 days ago

Literal and metaphorical red card

[–] xijinpingist@hexbear.net 9 points 3 days ago

Holy crap that shit would NEVER fly today! The whole print run would get recalled and pulped.

[–] OffSeasonPrincess@hexbear.net 14 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

"any Communist group" is totally unrealistic, we all know thered be a bunch of guys who refuse to work with the revisionist international communist conspiracy

[–] xijinpingist@hexbear.net 11 points 3 days ago

LOL Steve Jackson was pretty right. It's odd to think now but most of the hacker/phone phreak community was back then. During Gulf War I patriotic US hackers tried to break into Iraq's X.25 network and mess things up but Iraq had so little communications infrastructure they couldn't do much.

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 13 points 3 days ago

Never realized it's the same guy who also made Munchkin.

[–] SnakeEyes@hexbear.net 13 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I remember there was this huge conspiracy brain thing on certain forums and the /x/ board about him predicting the future, and getting harassed by the FBI, pretty funny in retrospect

[–] xijinpingist@hexbear.net 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Ah, that was the famous Secret Service raid of the Illuminati BBS. Pre-internet (well, before public access anyway) It was something like he had some Anarchist cookbook material on there and the SS wildly overstepped their authority and raided him and shut down the BBS. I actually had an acoremoved on there because I was local in Austin but never used his BBS because it was lame. Striesand Effect, he got massive publicity from it and was a hero of the PGP anon.penet.fi and FTP era of the internet.

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Was the remote but traceable connection to Lee Harvey Oswald known/talked about back then?

It just all seems like a big mindfuck.

[–] xijinpingist@hexbear.net 8 points 3 days ago

Yes, I remember that it was known that Oswald had been to Russia. That's why he killed JFK, see? They reprogrammed him as a Manchurian candidate to come back and kill the president. Totally had nothing to do with the fact that JFK got the US Treasury to print its own money instead of Federal Reserve Notes. I still have one, it has a red seal instead of the usual green. It says UNITED STATES NOTE instead. LBJ quickly discontinued the program and these bills are little more than collector's curios now.

[–] JoeByeThen@hexbear.net 10 points 3 days ago

Yeah, them getting busted was a huge thing in the hacker community at the time. I was still too young understand everything behind why it happened though. This clears some things up.

[–] BelieveRevolt@hexbear.net 12 points 3 days ago (2 children)

This game became infamous because of the Terrorist Nuke card, for obvious reasons.

[–] RedWizard@hexbear.net 12 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I mean, by the time this game was being produced those towers had been attacked at least once right?

[–] BelieveRevolt@hexbear.net 11 points 3 days ago

Yeah, the first WTC bombing was in 1993. That fact never stopped any of the “[media] PrEdIcTeD 9/11” claims.

[–] BanMeFromPosting@hexbear.net 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

This game looks sick as fuck, wish I could play it. Has the same vibes as netrunner, which I only know from when I found a deck at my dads´when I was a kid

[–] xijinpingist@hexbear.net 14 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

It was all right. Illuminati was an early microgame like Car Wars. I used to play it, it was lots of fun attacking each other and backstabbing. SO many games back then were violent PVP conflict. Today Eurogames are all about counting cubes and building a machine to manufacture victory points. This was the collectible card version of Illuminati to cash in on the success of MTG. I remember there was a USA card too that I badly wanted. I found someone selling it on USENET and got it. Sold in Europe only! Violent, government, conservative, high global power and the artwork was the Statue of Liberty with her foot on the globe with the caption Try and stop us! I doubt it's in this archive because it was a foreign-only card. I would get so much meme mileage out of this card. Maybe next time I'm in the States I'll try to find a card dealer with it.

[–] LENINSGHOSTFACEKILLA@hexbear.net 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] xijinpingist@hexbear.net 3 points 2 days ago

You can find sets of it on ebay or boxes of cards at dealers like Rudy from Alpha investments.

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 3 points 2 days ago

I think it's mildly interesting how enlightened centrist media like this always fails to be centrist. Look at the discrepancies between the Nationalization and Privatization cards both in the art and effects.