What is the Illuminati card game?
The “Illuminati cards” are the cards of the Illuminati game series released by the American game company Steve Jackson Games. It first appeared as a boxed game in 1982, and in 1994–1995 hundreds of cards were released as the trading card game Illuminati: New World Order (INWO).
In the satirical game, players become secret societies controlling the world from behind the scenes, bringing governments, corporations and all kinds of groups under their control in a bid for world domination. It was made as a humorous parody of conspiracy theories themselves.
What was the Illuminati?
The original Illuminati was a real secret society founded in Bavaria, Germany, in 1776 by the university professor Adam Weishaupt. It aimed to spread Enlightenment ideas but was dissolved around 1785 by the Bavarian government’s ban. Afterward, however, conspiracy theories that “the Illuminati survived and secretly controls the world” were passed down, making it, alongside Freemasonry, the archetypal secret-society legend.
The “prophecies” of the Illuminati cards
The cards became an urban legend because their illustrations were said online to have “predicted” later events. For example, the “Terrorist Nuke” card, showing a burning high-rise, was said to predict the September 11, 2001 attacks, and other cards were said to predict great earthquakes, nuclear accidents, pandemics and presidential elections. In Japan they became widely known around the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011.
The truth about the Illuminati cards
There are hundreds of cards, many satirically depicting events “likely to happen someday,” such as terrorism, disasters, riots and disease. It has been pointed out that by looking for a card with a similar picture after any big event, almost anything can be made to look like a “hit.” Some of the images circulating as prophecies are fan creations or edited images, not official cards.
In 1990 the company was also raided by the U.S. Secret Service over a game manuscript. The raid actually concerned a different product, and the company later won in court, but the incident also fed the rumor that “the government feared the prophecies.”
