How I Made the MIT Orientation Trading Card Game by Kayode D. '27

The year is 2021. It’s a Sunday night in early January. My mother comes into my room. My floor is strewn with cardboard, canvases, markers and felt, boxes and tiny army soldiers. I’m sitting at my desk which is covered in cardstock and stacks of cards. I am furiously scribbling on a 2.5”x3.5” pieces of paper. I am putting the finishing touches on my Magnum Opus: Tommy’s Backyard: the board game. 

The first iteration of "Relic", a randomly generating dungeon crawler I made in high school.

A photo of my camera roll from the first set for "Tommy's Backyard: the board game". This was a game I made for Tommy's birthday and featured our friends and inside jokes from over the years.

The first game I ever made, Cornucopia. It was very similar to my mental image of Mario Party, a game that to this day I have never played.

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…

Last year, I was an MIT Orientation Leader. This meant that I helped prepare campus to welcome the ~1,100 incoming students. It was a blast, and so this year, I applied to be an Orientation Captain! I got the position⁠01 captain of the white team 🤪' , along with new blogger Caleb M. ‘27⁠02 captain of the orange team 🙄' . 

On top of this, I was a part of the Flag Color Competition Committee. This was a group of captains that organized the games and fun events during Orientation to encourage student attendance. The incoming class of twelve-hundred is split up into twelve teams of a hundred-ish students each, and the top team at the end of the week gets a secret prize….….red on top. .

Going into the planning meetings over the summer, I was super excited to showcase the ideas I had. I LOVE board games and games in general, and I love MIT, so this is the perfect opportunity to make a massive, campus-wide game. I took some time to prepare the following presentation to present to my fellow captains on the committee with game ideas:

imagine me presenting this through a zoom call

Self explanatory game idea pitch: Minute-to-Win-It games that the students play instead of staff. Logistically a bit tricky but worth trying.

I also really wanted to play kickball. I love kickball. I thought this would help keep atheletes attending events if they knew we would be playing Kickball afterwards. We ended up having it at a weird time and it was fun, but not super popular.

Reminder, the goal is to make an easily accessible game that a lot of people can play, and puts the power to win the Red Sox tickets into the hands of students.

BOOM 💥💥💥

At the beginning of the week, every student is given a pack of MIT Trading cards with [twelve, i go the number wrong here] identical cards matching their team's color.

To complete their set, they must go find students on other teams that they may not have otherwise spoken to, and start a conversation to trade cards. This encourages social interaction outside of orientation small groups.

Where will the art come from? I wanted to have art be made by students, and I even pitched the idea to Margaret Zhang, creator of the illustrious Wide Tim, and she loved the idea!

Thank you for coming ot my TedTalk.

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And thus, the MIT Orientation Trading Card Game was born! I had a LOT of ideas for how the game could go. I’ve dreamed for years of making real board games that people would actually want to play, and this was my chance to make a game on the scale of hundreds of concurrent players. But what do I need to consider when making this game? In my research over the years, I’ve found three key components to any good game. You need not excel in all areas, but you must adequately balance or excel in at least one to be “successful”. 

• Mechanics: How strategically deep is your game?
• Theme: What story is the game telling? What imagery does gameplay evoke?
• Aesthetics: Is the game fun to look at? or does it look like it was made by a high schooler out of cardboard and scotch tape?
  

Looking through these three lenses helps you see what works well/doesn’t for games like Chess⁠03 Very deep strategically, creates a story both within the game and surrounding your understanding of the opponent, and visually has a lot of room for creative expression. Solid game. , Pokemon Cards⁠04 The actual card game does have mechanical depth, but the imagery and world built around the cards is so rich that most people don't even play the game. Aesthetically, this game does so well that individual cards can sell for thousands of dollars. A Grade-A example of thematic worldbuilding and visuals in a game.' , Exploding Kittens⁠05 While not at strategically deep as chess or other card games, exploding kittens excels at it's ease of entry. The game can be fully explained in a few sentences and even children can play the game with full strategies. Thematically, the image of an exploding kitten is much stronger than a bomb, and this paired with the cartoon graphic aesthetic creates a game that captures both children and adults in the fun. Good game. , and the accursed Candy Land⁠06 CANDY LAND IS NOT A GAME. There is absolutely no strategy involved. You just draw cards and move around. A fish flipping around on a table could play the game with the same strategic brilliance as Magnus Carlsen. You just pick up cards and move that many spaces. That is not a game. The only thing it has going for it is it's candy theming and pleasing visuals. It's simplicity makes it popular among very, very small children, but it poses no significance as a real game beyond that. At least in my opinion. The world it build up is nice, though. .

So when making this game, I wanted to think carefully about what I was doing: The goal of the game is to foster communication and conversation. If the cards look bad, they wont be valuable [no one really REALLY wants to collect just tiny pieces of paper for no reason.] There also has to be potential for this to be a GAME. 

Do I create a game to play with the cards like with Pokemon Cards? Or what about having variety in the cards randomly inserted into packs? Would that make the game more fun or add disparity between players who start wit better/worse cards? Additionally, how am I going to acquire all of these cards? For each students to have a twelve-card pack, plus extras for OLs and staff, we’d need 16,200 cut cards. I wanted to find a company to outsource this to and seek fundraising from somewhere at MIT, but time was running out. A lot of things to consider, a lot of ideas to toss around…

Ultimately, the Office of the First Year staff told me to take it a step back for this year, and do what we can with what we have, but not to go overboard getting third-party printers or anything like that for right now. Maybe next year 😞 BUT STILL SO EXCITING. 

Card Designs:

Here are the card designs! They were made by a member of the OFY team for the candlyand [bombastic side-eye] themed orientation. I was able to reuse them for the card designs!

Here is the back art for the cards, made by fellow blogger Gloria Z. '26. The GOAT. // Part of the original idea was that to be counted, cards had to have the original owner's name on the back, to connect back the ownership of each card. I ended up scrapping this idea in the end, and it serves as a point of confusion for the game.

For packaging, I took inspiration from this pack of trading cards I got at a Future Teens concert freshman year.

Such a phenomenal band. Such a great concert. Such an amazing memento. Absolute Blog.

Different pack ideas I threw around.

My friend packing some of the cards in the end! very time consuming process. I see why Future Teens only had a handful for sale, and not *checks notes* 1350 of them...

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TO CAMPUS I GO

In Late August, I flew back to MIT. I wrote a blog about the airplane and getting airplane trading cards, then began having meetings and trainings to prep for MIT Orientation 2025. We sent the card print order to the MIT Copytech department, and a few days later all 16,200 were printed, cut, and in a box in the OFY.

Now, I just had to package them. Oh right. 

Friends who came to help pack up the cards! Many thanks friends🙏🙏

All of the cards packed. Initially I wanted to use paper to make little packs for that satisfying rip feeling, but that was taking wayyyy too long. In the end we had someone go get rubber bands to tie them together instead. Much MUCH faster.

The Captains backstage with President Sally Kornbluth! She spoke at the opening ceremony.

Other photo from the week: We had a spirit contest, and my team [white team] did a boy band performance of "I Want It That Way" by the Backstreet Boys.

🐵🤔

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Luckily, I was able to recruit a group of my friends and we packaged all 1350 packages of cards in under three hours [ahh!]. Thank you phenomenal friends 👏👏👏. 

All that was left was to announce the game to the freshman…

I was sweating soooo hard backstage. I was going to announce and present my game. To the entire class of 2029. When they call my name to go onstage. Also Sally Kornbluth was there. But more importantly, I was sweating nervously like crazy. High school me would die if he knew what I was doing right now, where I was, and what I was about to announce. 

In the end, the game had a generally positive reception from the crowd. I didn’t want to overload information, so I left some info out [which would turn out to be a very important mistake later]. 

They open their cards

After the presentation, the students went out to Kresge field and opened up their packs of cards, and…. 

They loved it!!!

Everywhere I looked, I saw students searching for cards to complete their set, and it felt like I had actually made something. I had actually made a card game. And it was being played. Caleb came running up to me at one point and shouted “KAYODE THEY LOVE IT. WE CANT GET THEM TO STOP” and it felt so accomplishing. Maybe I’ll drop out and start developing games.

IMG_4165<— For whatever reason it’s not letting me embed the video. This downloads the video, feel free to do this…or not. haha

I watched students wander around Kresge Oval, asking other students to trade cards and starting conversations! And it wasn’t just the introverted, game-loving nerds who were trading cards [like I expected], but I also saw athletes and the future frat/sorority people getting into it, too! People were so into the game that we had to shout for them to stop playing and go back inside for the next presentation. The OFY staff approached me during all of the chaos to tell me it was an amazing idea and we will definitely do it again next year. 

I did notice some clear improvements that could be made to the game. For one, there was no reason to have a conversation with anyone. It was faster to just trade and walk away, so many students didn’t end up really talking to a ton of people if their main goal was to complete their set. Additionally, the game was short! Some students speedran the game and finished in five minutes, and when they asked me what to do next, I had to tell them that they won [ 🥳 ] and now the game is over. There was no reason to interact through the game beyond the first fifteen minutes. All things to consider when improving the game for next year…

Epilogue:

There was another board game that debuted during orientation, called Analogia. I’ll explain more about this game in a later blog, but what matters for this story is the creator, Cassie L. Cassie works in the MIT Media Lab at the Centre for Constructive Communication, and Caleb M. ‘27 was kind enough to introduce us after I debuted my game. I told Cassie about my game and heard more about the work she’s done designing social games similar to mine. We talked about board game design, and from talking about making and playing different types of games, I realized how much she knows and how much I could learn from her. She knows so much more than me, and I desperately wanted to hear more about the things she’s working on. 

Luck for me, at the end of our conversation, she asked me if I wanted to keep working on this game. She then offered me a UROP to work under her on social game design at the MIT Media Lab.

I WORK ON BOARD GAMES AT THE MIT MEDIA LAB

So now I have a job working in the MIT Media Lab in the Center for Constructive Communication, developing my game for next year’s orientation. WHAAAAATTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

IMAGINE if little high school Kayode could read that sentence way back when. Before I came to MIT I didn’t do many technology-related activities, and most of my time was spent making board games. I didn’t think that it was the kind of thing that MIT would look for in an applicant [I was surely mistaken], and even after I got in, I thought it was something I wouldn’t be able to keep doing with time commitments. 

BUT NOW. I WORK AT THE MIT MEDIA LAB. MAKING BOARD GAMES. 

I WORK THERE. In that building. And I make board games. God is Good.

Many blogs coming. Big blogs coming. Yippee. 

if i get a single comment asking, i will go back and put a pdf of the cards. i’m tired and don’t wanna do all of that linking right now. but if someone wants it, i will!!