1000 Blank White Cards is a family favorite, introduced to us by a good friend of mine. A good discussion of the game itself is available on Wikipedia, so I won’t bore you with the details. We play with most of the suggested card limitation rules. We allow people to pen a couple of cards to start the game, then sprinkle some blank ones throughout the deck.

The picture is a collection of some of my favorites. You’ll notice a media bias. There are lots of cards in our deck that refer to Doctor Who, Pokémon, as well as Monty Python. Media-inspired cards make up less of the deck than you might expect, though, under 10%.

The kids love creating their own cards. They enjoy coloring them even more. In fact, when we played tonight, it was hard to keep them from just coloring cards. We have a rule that the artist must give permission to have their card colored.

The ones I treasure most are ones made by people who don’t often play with us, like my mom and Thor, our friend who introduced us to the game.

This game is a great way to have some cheap fun, but it’s real value comes as a deck forms over several games. For example, you can see looking at some of my teenage son’s previous cards and his newer ones that he’s maturing: the art is better and the game mechanics are better reasoned. My youngest son likes to create cards that grossly unbalance the game, but my older son looks at that as I do – as numbing the fun.

He and I tend to create cards with more subtle themes, like the “Fork of Rassilon” in the center of the photo. For those of you who can’t read the text, the Fork is played on another card, and it allows you to choose whether a condition applies to you. For example, if there was a card, “If you are under 11, +500”, with the Fork, I could choose that, for the purposes of the card, I was under the age of 11.

I strongly recommend the game.