The Old Ways Must Go

The Old Ways Must Go is  a co-operative story telling game about coming together to create new ideas, frameworks, or rituals from outdated, decaying old ones.  Its structure offers a framework for creating new rituals and for guiding gentle conversations for healing and moving forward in times of community upheaval. And we've found it offers an intuitive technique for building or deepening your relationship with your favorite tarot or oracle deck.

The Old Ways Must Go is a tool for collaborative deconstruction that is playable like a game, using your own tarot or oracle deck.  The full version takes about two hours to play and includes guidelines for online collaboration.

The Optimists Guide to Tarot is a quick reference book that provides a simple, straightforward, and optimistic interpretive layout for tarot.

In Good Company: Tarot Templates for Two or More is a collection of unique layouts and prompt questions designed for structuring important conversations with or for pairs, teams, or communities.

Why Tarot Based Tools?

We are living through a time of paradigm shifts.  Many of us know what frameworks are failing us, yet few have the capacity to imagine alternatives.  

Tarot is a card game that has evolved over the centuries to become a profound tool for looking inward and forward.  What if we can imagine new ways of using tarot? Kind, collaborative, and playful ways that help us imagine the futures we want while composting the broken scaffoldings into new structures and frameworks.

To do this we started with game design ideas, and indeed have created a game that allows players to imagine an old structure and create new, more inclusive rituals from it.  Yet we've discovered in "playing" that meaningful conversations and profound insights come with each round.  

The Old Ways Must Go explores how individual agency and collective storytelling come together to create new meanings from old structures: it is hopeful, collaborative, and reflective.   It allows for brave conversations and intuitive insights about how we engage in meaning-making.  And, at its best, it supports healing conversations for supporting fracturing or frustrated communities to re-engage and find a path forward.  

What do I need to play?

You'll need a tarot, oracle, or other imagery-heavy card deck of your own. Preferably one with evocative art that speaks to you on a visceral level.   Familiarity with traditional tarot meanings is not necessary for this game.  It involves spontaneous and collaborative interpretations of imagery in context.  Though designed for tarot, any card deck with imagery of personal significance will work.  

The Old Ways Must Go is the game component for a collection of 'zines co-created with Moth Rodriguez, called Tarot for Transformation.  More information and physical copies of the zine and an optional play mat,  available at https://www.galileogames.com/tarot-for-transformation/