10/22/2026
š Desert Bus for Hope starts tomorrow! š Every year they livestream for about a week, raising money for Child's Play charity, which provides toys, games, and other positive experiences for young hospital patients. This year I reached deep into my nerd bag and made for the craftalong The Game of Hope: Hades 2 edition, which is up for auction starting at 12 pm Pacific time on Tuesday the 27th!
The Game of Hope was a 36-card deck printed in the early 1800s (the British Museum has a copy you can check out on their online archive!), which aside from card games, could also be laid out as a board game of a simple chutes & ladders type. (If you're also a huge nerd: it's nearly identical to the Game of Goose.) Roll dice to race from step 1 to step 35, various obstacles & rewards of chance, that's it, that's the game. Hades 2 is a video game where you repeatedly attempt to get either down to Hades' Palace in Tartarus, or up to the top of Mount Olympusāand I thought, well, that makes the rotational nature of card designs pretty useful, doesn't it?
When you lay out this version of the Game of Hope, both paths of Hades are illustrated, and which path reads as upright to each player is just about which side of the table they're on. With 1 at your bottom right, features of the surface are upright and you move up to Olympus; with 1 at your top left the underworld is upright and you move down to Tartarus. I made one player token for each of Hades' Keepsakes (they don't give you any game benefits, they're just cute), and a bunch of fake Chronos tokens to use instead of real money because a bunch of punishment squares make you fork up for the winner's pot. (All these old games were just gambling, time is a flat circle, etc.) Extremely fun to play around with Hades' impeccable design work, and once I beat my own head into shape about a style, I really enjoyed doing this black-figure pottery inspired stuff.
a bunch of process recordings are in a highlight! all the black elements are a solvent transfer from toner prints, and then the series of split fountains went on top. ranks handset in Libra. outer box printed with chicory and Jupiter's Beard.
