Review: Ultimate RPG Campfire Card Deck

I was given this over the holiday season by family - a nice gift in the sense of it was never something I was going to buy myself but has found its place at table.

As per the front of the box "150 cards for sparking in-game conversation" in a chunky box, with an X-card and a pamphlet with guidance.

The instructions are maybe ~A5 equivalent on a fold out card; the back is title, legalese and a bit about the author so all the actual guidance is 1//3 'how to play' and 2/3 describing the categories of cards and the process flow.

The cards themselves are in six categories - Past, Present, Companions, Dreams, World and Hypotheticals - each a 25 card block. You are supposed to check in with the table about which categories to include then shuffle them all up and draw randomly.

The strict pattern from the guidance is to draw two, one to answer yourself and one to ask another person at the table. We ended up having everyone present draw a card and lay them face up in the centre then going around the table with everyone picking which of the face-up topics they wanted to answer.

At 150 cards the deck is huge, you wil be cycling through it for a long time before it gets to feel repetitive.

I tried it out with my hexcrawl campaign and it has gone down surprisingly well - people were fine to give it a first shot and then were happy to come back again in later sessions which was the real test to me.

It works well with this campaign that has journeys and a travel focus to it - other campaigns I have run have tended towards travel being less of a focus and 'downtime' feel like a waste of time rather than something to devote time to. Whether or not this deck fits with your table is going to depend on which of those is true for you.

It is a nice tool for what it does, particularly for 'warming up' new groups who might not know each other so well. For very old and established groups I could see it either being helpful to jog folk out of their rut or being an impediment by forcing a direction of conversation when the group/campaign organically discusses things anyway. Again; judge where your table is at - if they already make their own campfire or tavern conversation, wedging this in may not be for your table.

So I see this being useful for campaigns which are not time-pressure - I would be wary of using this when you were trying to get an adventurers league one-shot game done or when you have a table that already plots, plans and RPs given time to do it. For everyone else, which I think will be many tables, if you are looking to encourage more

It is a bit heavy; I definitely notice it thrown in on top of my slimmed down gaming bag - but the table seems to like it so it continues to earn its space.