Make Your Own HAZMAT Deck

HAZARDOUS Conversations and Cards Against Toxicity

And conversations for humanity…

We made a game about talking about hard stuff. We know a lot of people are cooped up with others or by themselves right now, due to COVID-19. We are also probably having a lot of hard conversations about what is going on in the world and what the future is going to look like.

Now IS the time for those hard conversations.

We make games that use conversation as a core game mechanic. We are opening up our tools and processes up to the community so that you can use them to make your own conversation games.

The structure of the game includes three different kinds of cards: HAZARDOUS Sites, HAZARDOUS Materials and the super-duper important HAZMAT Suits [don’t leave home without one…].

  • HAZARDOUS Sites – Sites are a, “Let us suppose…” kind of situation where you may face whatever HAZARDOUS theme that you exploring.
  • HAZARDOUS Materials – Materials are prompts to reflect on how you (or others) have acted/felt/thought in the past. This is the “personal baggage” that we often carry with us through life.
  • HAZMAT Suits – Suits are “could” statements that offer players a better way to act/feel/think about these HAZARDOUS Materials going forward, and what they might consider differently that may protect them (perhaps others too) in this HAZARDOUS Site. These are hopeful/helpful prompts.

Make Your Own HAZMAT Deck…

What do you find hazardous in your life right now (Deck theme)? Where are you facing these hazards (Hazardous Sites)? What feelings/thoughts/beliefs/actions make that especially difficult for you or others (Hazardous Materials)? How might you protect yourself/do better (HAZMAT Suit)? 

For example… Possible HAZMAT themes:

Pandemics, Policing, Whiteness, Parenting, Work, Education, Dating, Sex, Home Improvement, Healthcare, Politics….

What is a hazardous conversation you think people need to have?

This is fine.

Software Requirements….

Because we are using Adobe’s Creative Cloud Suite (InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator) as well as Microsoft Excel to generate our games we didn’t know how to REALLY open up the game for others to use the “engine.” We use (we think it is pretty cool) a data-driven approach to how we generate our conversation games, it is a heck of a lot easier to iterate over a spreadsheet than it is to actually work in InDesign and do all the work of setting things up and manually placing items and what happens when you want to edit … blah, blah, blah. Since we have worked in digital games we decided to bring a data-driven approach to how we make non-digital games. We know we aren’t the first, but it has really changed how we make non-digital games.

Though we wanted to go full-tilt and use something like Scribus and other FLOSS tools, we are working on it but are not there yet. But, you can get a 7-day free trial of Adobe Creative Cloud right now! You can use Google Docs or LibreOffice Calc or whatever you like to generate tab-delimited files… Why not do it now? There are limitations, but we can play within those!

How To (Part 1)…

Yeah, we’re nerds. This is how we go about it… But you can also go off in your own direction.

  1. Create an itch.io account and join the HAZMAT: Pandemic Game Jam (if still running)
  2. Find your team… (Seriously this is easy and you can do it on your own if you want to… but you’re probably going to want to TALK to people as you make a game about conversation.)
  3. Decide your theme…
  4. Brainstorm the different aspects of the theme, and what you/your team consider the “explosive”, “flammable”, “corrosive”, and “toxic” aspects of it, the beliefs/thoughts/actions/feelings people have around/about it that should be talked about. 
    1. We recognize that there are gradients to these things. So a “flammable” isn’t always as bad as an “explosive,” but they are related to one another. That “corrosive” stuff become “toxic” over time. Like hoarding TP isn’t as bad as say hoarding N95 face masks…
  5. Head over to GitHub and download the repository containing all the files you’ll need: caseyodonnell/hazmatgame You can either use their desktop client to clone the repository or just download a ZIP file from the website.
  6. Open up the Microsoft Excel file: “HAZMAT-Pandemic Jam.xlsv”. You can use Excel if you have it or Google Docs or Libre Office Calc to edit the file. As you come up with your card prompts you will be entering them into this spreadsheet as you go.
  7. Identify the HAZARDOUS Materials…
    1. We tended to start with emotions, beliefs, and actions. Explore and write down the HAZARDOUS emotions/thoughts/beliefs/actions related to your theme. Frame these into open-ended questions that cannot be answered by simple yes/no/maybe answers. We tend to use questions here that start with “How” and “When.” 
    2. Assign them to the separate categories (or make your own new ones, but then the art is all on you): Flammable, Explosive, Corrosive, and Toxic.
    3. Make 40 HAZARDOUS Material Prompts (or change the number, its your game…)
  8. Identify the HAZARDOUS Sites…
    1. We went category by category (but you do you) and tried to find situations that the HAZARDOUS Materials might occur in. 
    2. We make these sites about “You” the player, the player’s friends, or family. Rather than large, systemic problems, frame the HAZARDOUS theme within our everyday lives and relationships (but you do you).
    3. The tricky part here is making it so that many Sites are applicable to many Materials, and vice versa. Aim for the Sites to be applicable to at least 3 Materials, and vice versa.
    4. Assign these into the separate categories as above.
    5. Make 15 HAZARDOUS Site Prompts (or change the number, its your game…)
  9. Identify the HAZMAT Suits…
    1. We used Emotional Intelligence/Socioemotional learning goals to frame “could” prompts for the HAZMAT Suits: “How could you”, “Who could you”, and “What could you.”
    2. Frame these could statements around these (or others) skills/outcomes and how they could specifically be used for your HAZARDOUS theme, to make it less hazardous: Confidence, curiosity, intentionality, self-control, relatedness, capacity to communicate, cooperativeness, self-awareness, personal decision making, managing feelings, handling stress, empathy, self-disclosure, insight, self-acceptance, personal responsibility, assertiveness, group dynamics, and conflict resolution.
    3. You don’t have to be as nerdy as us, but it really will make for better conversations… we promise.
    4. The tricky part here is making it so that many Suits are applicable to many Materials and Sites. See how many Sites/Materials each Suit is helpful for, aim for the Suit to fit at least 3 Sites/Materials each.
    5. Make 15 HAZARDOUS Suit Prompts (or change the number, its your game…)
  10. Plug all of these into our handy-dandy little spreadsheet! [Read more about the process of using our tools over here…]
  11. Follow the process outlined here in Part 2.
  12. BOOM! You have a Print-to/and-Play conversation card game!
  13. We have two ways to play, but make your own ways to play! Conversation is a game and it is up to you to decide the rules. Share those new ways to play with us and others. You might spark something for others.
  14. Submit your game on the HAZMAT Game Jam (Must be free, see Legal section below). (If Jam is over, game still must be free. Email us at comrades@affinity-games.com about your game, if you want we can feature it here or share it with others!)
  15. Share your game on social media with the hashtag #HAZMATJAM
  16. Play other people’s HAZMAT games.
  17. Rate other people’s HAZMAT games.

How To (Part 2)…

  1. Complete the steps outlined in Part 1. You should have an edited spreadsheet file, with Sites, Suits and Materials changed for your version of the game. You can, if you choose, change the names of the categories or even point at new image files if you change those.
  2. Save that Excel file and then do a “Save as…” or an export and produce a Tab Delimited file by the same name except with “.csv” or “.txt”.
  3. Next you’ll have to have InDesign installed, but open “HAZMAT-Pandemic Jam.indd”. Now, InDesign is going to yell at you something to this effect:
  5. The right answer to this question is: “Update Modified Links”. Next it will load and you’ll think, “Hey! That didn’t change anything! The card still has these stupid things with ‘<<>>’ around them!” Totally true story. 
  6. BUT! Go to the “Data Merge” Panel. If you don’t see it, go to “Window” -> “Utilities” -> “Data Merge”.
  7. Now click that little “Preview” check-box in the window. Suddenly your cards will appear and you can browse through them one at a time! IT’s like magic!
  8. You’re also going to say, “Eww! Those images look like crap! These folks don’t know what the hell they’re doing!” You might be right about the conclusion, but you just have to go to the “View” menu -> “Display Performance” and select “High Quality Display”. You can browse through your cards and see how they look. 🙂
  9. But to generate your full document, you’ll have to go to: “Generate Merged Document” in the Data Merge panel. That will give you this below. You’ll want to leave most of the settings the same here. 
  11. Do “All Records” and that “Generate Overset Text Report” will tell you if any of the prompts you made were too long. But once you hit “OK” InDesign will generate a NEW InDesign document and open it.
  12. You’ll have to save it somewhere.
  13. You’ll probably again be thinking, “This didn’t work! I still see the stupid ‘<<>>’ stuff!” Go to the “Pages” panel. There are all your pages.
  14. Double-click one and then you can scroll through them all! You just generated an entire deck of your cards! Huzzah!
  15. Next you can export a PDF of these pages. If you want the “Code of Conduct” cards and “Instruction” cards you can use “HAZMAT-PJ-Extras.indd” to export those PDFs.
  16. The last step is to take that PDF document and “Print” them into a new PDF file that is six pages to each page. You can use Acrobat or Preview or whatever you want for that.

You just made a conversation game!

If you want to make promotional art using the same font that we use for the Title and Box art, you can snag that over here: Vladimir Nikolic‘s font “World Conflict” for the HAZMAT game title.

Then finally print out those cards and cut them up and you can play away!

(optional) If you want to get fancy the card backs are included in “HAZMAT-PJ-Extras.indd” as well and you can twist yourself in knots trying to get your printer to match things up.

(optional) You can change the text font/color and also the image colors in InDesign and then redo the data merge if you want!

Legal Note…

Creative Commons License


HAZMAT: The Game by Affinity Games, LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://hazmatgame.com. This means that your Print-to-Plays must be free. It also means you have to attribute the work as using/based on our work. If you want to make a physical copy through say,The Game Crafter, you can, you just can’t sell it. If you want to do that, talk to us: comrades@affinity-games.com.

If you want to know how to credit us, you can see a good way of doing this over on our site: https://hazmatgame.com/credits/