“Deus Ex Machina”

“Deus Ex Machina” was created in 2025. The concept had been sitting in my head for a long time after watching a Teen Titans episode as a child where the Teen Titans are playing a similar card game. The game had no rules that I could follow, all I knew was, “if Cyborg plays the meteor card, he wins,” in a matter-of-fact way. I wanted to create a similar card game where players played simple cards that ultimately beat out the cards players had just played in a “1-up” manner. The issue was I had no way to go about determining what a “meteor” beats and vice-versa. In the end, I realized, much like in a improv group, figuring out why a “meteor” is better than a “volcano” or the “ocean” is in itself a whole game.

From this idea, I created “Deus Ex Machina”. The game was originally called “Ass-pull” to illustrate the idea that a player saying “a volcano defeats a meteor because…” is akin to when you’re reading a book and a character pulls the solution “out of their ass” like it was nothing. To make it more family-friendly, I renamed it to the latin term used to describe such as situation: “God from the machine”.

Much like in Teen Titans, you use cards in your hand to “defeat” the cards played by other players, but in this game, you use creative solutions to explain how something like “waffles” might take down “The Holy Roman Empire” or a “T-Rex”. This creative card game acts as both an improvisational exercise and a time-constrained collaborative puzzle.