Ang Dabawenyo

All of us have something that we’re proud of in our families. Mine is the creative blood that courses through our veins. Our clan is populated with artistic people, from painters to writers. An aunt is adept at the canvass, and has done exhibits in New York and the Hague. While she modestly disavows being among the likes of Davao’s Ang Kiu Kok, Tita Didit is an accomplished artist in her own right. Other members of our clan are writers with portfolio: three of us have been published already. Yet another: a cousin, Celeste, a star pupil of the renowned Fernandez Piano School in Davao, is now a bona fide student of the prestigious Juilliard School in New York. She is also a practicing doctor in the United States.

And a recent addition to the clan’s artistic acclaim is Ria, who invented a unique card game called Talecraft. It is comparable — but dissimilar in genre — to the über-popular card game, Magic.

Talecraft, while for purposes of categorization is labeled a ‘card game’, is in fact a tool for creative thinking. The deck is not composed of characters with superpowers as you might expect, but of genres, archetypes, keys. To give you an idea, here’s an overview of how to play the game, from the words of Ria herself:

Pick one genre card, two archetype cards, and six key cards. Then in ten minutes, make a story out of those. Then tell everyone else about it. Basically that’s how it works. As a game, Talecraft aims to promote creative thinking through story creation. As a story-creation tool, Talecraft aims to help writers generate ideas for stories, and help combat Mental Block. The limit the picked cards set to a player prompts the use of the player’s resourcefulness; and the need to fit all the cards into a story stretches his imagination.

Ria, who also created this blog’s Dave mascot, said she conceptualized Talecraft around October last year. What gave her the inspiration was the challenging games she and her sisters would play. Ria is also an anime artist, and an outstanding one, even before she studied the art in Japan for 3 years. So you can expect to be awed by the designs of Talecraft’s pieces.

My sisters and I make stories a lot. One way that we make stories is, like Talecraft, we pick certain keywords, and make a story out of them. (Of course, that time, we weren’t using cards. We used rolled-up pieces of paper. Bunutan.) After a while, we decided to add genre to the picking, too. It was fun because we added genres like “inspirational” and “chick-lit” but none of us wanted to pick those. And we hated picking “General Fiction, no magic”, we being fantasy writers/readers. But it was fun. It was funny how we would try to force our stories to become a story of a genre we hardly read. The stories were either refreshingly new, or hilarious. Either way, it was fun. So, I thought, hey, a lot of people write stories, too! And the stories on local TV and cinema suck! They are all copies of existing western shows! But I know Filipinos are creative people. They just needed something to force them to think! So, I added Archetypes and Plotlines, and came up with Talecraft. And I can tell you, I’ve met Talecraft players who are FAR FAR better than many of those people behind the screen who call themselves writers.

Ria has done roadshows to introduce Talecraft in schools and bookstores, and the response has been very encouraging. I am proud beyond words of my cousin! And she’s a Dabawenyo! Too bad, though, that she’s now based in the capital. However, Talecraft will be made available in Davao very soon. Check out this blog in the near future for details.

To find out more about this creative card game, click on to the Talecraft site!