Open Trumps, a Data Game

We present Open Trumps, a version of the popular card game Top Trumps with decks that are procedurally generated based on open data. The game is played among multiple players through drawing cards and selecting the feature that is most likely to trump the same feature on the other players’ cards. Players can generate their own decks through choosing a suitable dataset and setting certain attributes; the generator then generates a balanced and playable deck using evolutionary computation. In the example dataset, each card represents a country and the features represent such entities as GDP per capita, mortality rate or tomato production, but in principle any dataset organised as instances with numerical features could be used. We also report the results of an evaluation intended to investigate both player experience and the hypothesis that players learn about the data underlying the deck they play with, since understanding the data is key to playing well. The results show that players enjoy playing the game, are enthusiastic about its potential and answer questions related to decks they have played significantly better than questions related to decks they have not played.