Creature Cards at GPN24

2026-06-13 by Spacehuhn

This was the third time we ran the creature cards game, this time at the Gulaschprogrammiernacht in Karlsruhe. Once again, we were surprised by the number of people who participated in our game! Towards the end, you could hardly take a step without having several creature cards in sight. We definitely learned a lot from this event, and we are now preparing for 40C3.

Like always, you can check out our stats page to see all the numbers from the event and the Creaturedex to see all the creatures that were discovered.

If you don’t know what the creature cards game is: it’s a game we created for 39C3, where you collect creatures by scanning NFC cards. You can also make your own cards, and we print and flash them for you at the event. Check out creaturecards.de/about for more info.

Leading up to GPN24

39C3 was a huge success for us. We had a lot of fun, and we were overwhelmed by the number of people who played. It was clear we would run the game again, so preparations began immediately. The backend was rewritten to support multiple events, and we searched for a new printer. In April, we ran the game at a small university event; you can read more about it in our other blog post.

It wasn’t fully clear if we would be able to attend GPN24. We were missing a ticket for one of our team members and didn’t have much time to prepare. We were also unsure if we’d get a good spot to set up our equipment. It all worked out in the end, and we got a great spot across from Chaos Post, near one of the entrances.

We brought what we thought was enough cards and printer ribbon. Now equipped with 2 printers, we were confident we could handle the smaller chaos event after surviving 39C3.

In terms of app updates or new game features, we didn’t have time to prepare anything. But we were still able to test one new feature: teams.

Creature Cards Everywhere!

Since the chaos community knew about our game from 39C3, we started gathering new players right from the start. On the first day, we already logged 269 active players and 61 new creatures printed on cards. This is quite significant given the size of ~2500 attendees at GPN24.

Day 2 was busier and Day 3 was the peak. This matches our experience from 39C3. What we didn’t expect was the sheer number of cards we printed. We saw a total of 562 new creatures, printed on 765 cards, with 843 active players throughout the event. It was so crazy that you could stand anywhere in the hall, look in any direction, and have more than one creature card in sight. Either on one of the pillars, on the wall, on a table, or on someone’s lanyard.

Teams

The new feature we tested at GPN24 were teams. Day 1 was quiet enough to quickly implement it and making 8 team cards, each with a different color and name. By scanning one of the team cards, you would join that team. If you scanned another team card, you would switch teams. Your discoveries would count towards the team score. The stats page showed the progress of the entire team.

Unsurprisingly, Team CYBER won. We will think of better team names for 40C3 :D

Donations

One small change we made at GPN24 is the recommended donation of 2€ per printed card, instead of 1€. While 1€ covers materials and printing costs, we noticed that it’s simply not enough to pay for the equipment we need. The bottom line is that we find ourselves investing more and more into this project, and we have to break even to keep doing this. We will make a page explaining this and other aspects in more detail to be transparent about it. Thanks to everyone who donated, we really appreciate it and we will put it to good use!

Printing Process

We once again noticed how crazy people got; we clearly struck a nerve with our game in this community. But given the size of GPN24, we were surprised to find out that we printed almost the same number of cards as at 39C3. Yes, we had fewer active players in total, but if you consider the number of attendees, we might have printed too many cards. Perhaps we have to find a good balance of cards per number of attendees and limit ourselfs to that. We have to think about that.

GPN24 made us worried about 40C3, as it will be much bigger. People know our game now, so it won’t take 2 days to reach critical mass anymore. We will probably reach it on day 0. If we extrapolate the numbers from GPN24 to 40C3, we will have a logistical/organizational nightmare! To deal with this, we are thinking about several changes to our printing process to make it more efficient and prevent long queues. We will make an announcement about this in time before 40C3.

What to expect at 40C3

We want to improve the app and open-source it, with hopes to expand on the player and team stats. Of course, the main focus will be on the hardware we are working on: a PCB badge used to train your creatures. We are also planning more documentation and examples to allow better integration with our API and creature cards in general. This and more will be announced in advance of 40C3, so stay tuned!

Honorable Mentions

We are super happy with the new creatures you all made! They are funny, they are creative, and they are weird. We love them all! It looks like you are all getting better at making cards, and we are excited to see what you will come up with for 40C3. We also had some great conversations about the game, the app, and the future of creature cards.

We flashed one creature card onto an implant (and this time we didn’t forget to remove the write protection!). Another person with an implant managed to copy a creature card onto it themselves. And a third person with several implants, unfortunately, didn’t have a compatible NFC tag. But we still learned a lot about it.

Thank you GPN orga, and everyone who came and made a card, played our game, or talked to us. It was a great experience, and we look forward to seeing you at 40C3 (or maybe other chaos events?).

Oh and R.I.P. to our table we found dead on the morning of the last day. The self drawn creature card on it as apology was a nice touch though.