- [Narrator] In a recent episode of "Obsessed"
we saw Bryan Berg build an eight foot tall
spaceship out of cards with nothing
holding it together except good design.
And he made it look easy.
But how easy is it?
Berg is gonna give us a quick lesson
on the basics, like how to use your hands
as tools and what shape to start with.
Once you master those simple skills
you can use them to build pretty much anything.
- I'm here to show you how to turn
ordinary playing cards into something amazing.
- [Narrator] Fist step, here's a list of don'ts.
- You're not gonna wanna try to do this
on shag carpet, you're not gonna wanna
try to do it maybe on glass.
Something that has a little more texture to it.
Just a normal tabletop.
Also, don't try it outside, don't try it in front of a fan,
don't do it in a moving vehicle.
Those things are all problematic.
- [Narrator] To build your foundation
Berg advises against the traditional triangle shape.
Instead, he starts with squares and right angles.
- I'm gonna hold the first card in my left hand,
I'm just gonna park it here.
So it's really hard, but you gotta remember,
not until you've got all four of these cards
put together are you gonna let go.
There's the fourth card, still wiggling,
but look, I'm just gonna lean all four of those together.
This is a little sloppy.
Each one of them is leaning in.
Notice each one is at the halfway point.
And notice that I've created a little box in the center.
This is the fundamental beginning cell
of any card house, from small to massive.
If you can accomplish this little box
and get that to happen, you're really
like 90% of the way there.
But I'm just gonna keep making these little boxes.
And as I go this will kinda turn into
what I call the grid.
- [Narrator] He has a couple extra little tips
to get you from the first story,
to the second, to the third, fourth, fifth,
however tall you wanna go.
- I'm just gonna quickly throw a little roof on this.
You're really just trying to get the most
even roofing that you can, that isn't five cards thick
in one place and one card thick in another,
in the very center.
So imagine it getting thicker, and thicker,
and thicker in the middle,
but not so much on the edges.
You're gonna create this dome effect on your roof.
And what that's gonna cause is your cards to dance around,
they're not gonna wanna sit.
But you'll notice I did put the numbers up.
The numbers are up because typically
playing cards are sorta shaped like this.
And that means that every card
kinda creates two contact points.
And that card's just gonna wanna sit there.
All right.
If it were like this, that card's gonna wanna dance around.
- [Narrator] When you put all these steps together
you have endless options of what you can build.
And you'll be surprised at how strong your card houses are.
And to prove it, Berg is gonna build another grid,
and then stress test it.
- Okay, so we're gonna build the same grid we built before.
I'm gonna use two or three cards at a time
to just kind of beef up the strength
of this thing a little bit.
And you could do it with one card,
depending on what you want to do with this thing.
I double 'em up, triple them up a lot,
to just make it more of a brick house,
less of a card house.
So that when the clumsiest person in the room
is moving around, which is me, and I get too close to it,
that just the slightest draft doesn't
cause it to start to fall apart.
These larger structures become really strong.
So you might have something sitting around
that you can use to stress test your house of cards.
So in this case I just happen to have
a concrete block sitting here.
And I'm just gonna set it on there.
[Bryan tapping and pounding]
Do we have another one?