Following his tenure at Critic Te Ārohi as 2019 Editor, one marked by “that” Knox College investigation and a war on shady landlords, Charlie O’Mannin has managed to keep himself busy. The Dunedin local turned indie board game creator hopes that his most recent venture helps educate players about the weird and wonderful world of 12th century medieval saints.
Charlie started working on the game during Covid-19 lockdowns, thinking it would be a good way to pass the time. The side project soon became a full-time commitment, ending up as a three year long odyssey.
We won't bother trying to describe exactly how this game works. Just like snorting Raro, you won't understand until you've tried it. The basics are that everyone gets dealt a series of large cards depicting saints. Each saint has their own historically accurate holy powers, which you can use to inflict suffering onto other saints.
Charlie worked painstakingly hard scouring the web to find medieval sources telling the stories of these holy revenants. The hope is that certain saints will interest the player enough to open the compendium provided, a book which tells the stories of each of these obscure saints. While there are over 10,000 saints to have chosen from, Charlie narrowed it down to the lesser known 12th century medieval Catholic ones, some of which the modern day church are apparently embarrassed about. They just ain’t vibin’.
For example, you can play as St Francis Xavier, a missionary who famously lost his crucifix while at sea. The compendium will tell you that when he got to shore he encountered “a monstrous crab holding his crucifix aloft in a dripping claw.” This is historically accurate – there’s a school named after this bloke in Mornington.
Charlie built the indie card game with his talented friends Dan, Saskia, Miro, Lucy, and Natasha. Many are also retired Critic Te Ārohi staff, including Saskia Rushton-Green, the illustrator of the controversial 2018 menstruation issue cover. These talents came in clutch when designing the larger playing cards, capturing the vivid medieval Latin aesthetics.
These six creators each own shares in the company Polycarp Inc, which produced the game. The title comes from the Turkish church named after Saint Polikarp. Its motto is "God is a clown". Charlie visited the church while creating the game, noting that, "We could almost have taken that motto for the game."
It took his team three months of intensive playtesting to weed out any inconsistencies and imbalances of power. Charlie set up six hour playtests each day, dragging in "every single person I knew, everyone they knew, and everyone those people knew.” It reached the point where he was able to host a tournament at Yours cafe using laminated playing cards. Though the game was still a work in progress at this point, Charlie reflects that it “was great to see people had played it so often, they were quite competitive.”
While the game is filled with religious imagery and themes, Charlie is not religious himself. Instead, he is drawn to the aesthetics and the history of medieval catholicism. "It's not weird to be into Norse or Greek mythology," he said, so it shouldn't be weird to be into monstrous crab adjacent saints. Maybe the Percy Jackson cult should ditch the demigods and start fangirling over some medieval saints instead.
A year and a half since the game’s release, the team has sold around 400 copies. It is stocked in both Dunedin Models and Games Store and Card Merchant.
You can buy the box set of Saints: The Card Game on their company’s website polycarp.co.nz.