- Hey it's Jonathan in Austin, Texas.
I'm here with Justin Robert Young.
Justin it's great to see you again.
- Good to see you man.
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- Justin you've been busy since the
last time we hung out.
- I have been, I have been.
I've been working on this game, The Contender.
It's the game of presidential debate, and it's been
really just a huge part of my life for the past year.
- Now, the cool thing about this game,
first of all, it was crowdfunded.
- Yeah, Kickstarter.
- Mildly succesful.
- It was, it was.
We launched it about two weeks before
Donald Trump announced that he was in the race.
That very much heightened political awareness,
and I think we rode that to the tune of $142,000,
which is great, and amazing.
The amount of money where you wake up
one day and you're like "oh wait, i thought i was
"just Kickstarting a card game."
As it turns out, I am now the proprietor
of a small business.
(laughing) - Yeah, right.
So walk me through, what exactly
is the premise behind this game?
- So, the idea of the game is to simulate a debate.
Start at Cards Against Humanity or Apples to Apples
in the idea that you have a topic.
So this would be what the moderator,
what you're Megan Kelly or Chris Wallace
would be asking the candidates.
So Iran for example, would be a topic.
Then each person has a hand of five cards
that they then make their best three card argument.
But unlike the other, Apples to Apples
or Cards Against Humanity or games like that,
you don't play them secretly, you play them
out in front, and they're all meant to come together.
So you can argue with people with
"but what's in it for us?"
Or, you can have your debate point be
slammed down with a thunderous #nofilter.
- Right.
- The funny thing about all these cards,
is that they're based, all of them
are based on real quotes.
- Right.
- And so either we took the quotes
and used them just as they were,
because they were perfect for the context
of our game, or we did our own little,
- Like, summary.
- Yeah, our own summary on them.
It goes as old as James Madison
to as recent as Joe Biden.
And we are launching our 2016 expansion
in the next month or so.
- So I hear the really amazing thing
about this card game,
- Yeah.
is that you can
have people from all over the spectrum
of politics who enjoy playing this game
because it's really about that political theater you were
talking about earlier. - Yeah.
- Yeah, it's about political speech, specifically.
And it's something that is a very
hot button issue on both sides of the aisle right now.
Both for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
That people who literally think of it
or Politicians, is identified as being very put-on.
- Right.
- And that everything, you can
switch your positions in two seconds.
And that's something that this game really taps into.
We went out to the Iowa caucuses,
to pump up the game and just spread it around,
and we delivered a copy of the game
to all the volunteers at every campaign.
We did these live events and you'd
have somebody that was out there
to caucus for Ted Cruz, and there to
caucus for Bernie Sanders and both of them
knew it, and yet they could engage their
political love without it turning into 'who is better'.
It was about their passion, and how silly it can be.
And that is something that we've
taken great pride in, and we really really
love about the game.
- I love that you've taken something that has
really become a very time-consuming,
(laughing)
like idea.
It must have taken ages to develop this
and playtest it and get it just right.
- The funny thing is that we're launching this
in the next two weeks is, that in our research to
get all those quotes, we wound up just by accident,
compiling the largest searchable database
of vetted presidential quotes.
- That's amazing.
- Because there's plenty of sites that have
quotes, but it's like,
users put them up, and nobody really searches through them.
- Firstly, I can't wait to play this.
I've been hearing about it forever.
So I'm really looking forward to getting
my hands on a copy.
I'm gonna get one real soon.
If people wanted to pick up a copy
of it, where do they go?
They go to Thecontender.us, which is our site,
that'll also happen to Politically Incorrect expansion,
as well as the 2016 expansion.
Or, everybody buys everything on Amazon.
- Sure. - So you can just
go ahead on over there too.
If you've got a prime account, throw a
Politically Incorrect expansion,
because this game is actually family friendly.
So you could play it in a school if you wanted to.
And then the Politically Incorrect
has all the curse words and stuff
- Right. - Where we cut out
so we can make it family friendly.
(laughing)
- Justin thank you so much.
Guys, I want to thank you for joining
me for this episode of Now.
Make sure you come back to now.howstuffworks.com,
every single day to learn about the
coolest stories going on right now.
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