Where this started
My brother said, half-drunk and apparently sincere, “Greer needs a trading card.” A light went off. I pitched the concept to Manus the next morning and didn’t come back up for six months.
Two former-X-Files-obsessives mid-conversation about the recent UFO/UAP disclosure noise kept circling the same question — where is Steven Greer in all this? He’d been pushing disclosure for decades, and the Tom DeLonge era seemed to have eclipsed him almost overnight. My brother said Greer needed a trading card. The next day I opened Manus — which I was using for work every day at the time — and pitched it as a research brief: was this doable, what were the legal landmines, was there a real game inside the idea. Manus came back with the bones of a full trading-card game. (When I handed my brother the finished deck months later, he had no memory of the conversation. I suspect drinks were involved. He loved it anyway.)
What Redacted actually is
A satirical trading-card game about UFO disclosure, with credibility as the resource currency. Card names are fake the way Garbage Pail Kids names were fake — the art is openly based on the people you’d guess.
The mechanic that does the most work is credibility. Every card costs credibility to play, some cards swing the public-opinion meter, and a “Mainstream Authority” tier kicks in once you cross 20. The joke writes itself when a character card modeled on the Ancient Aliens guy with the hair comes in at low credibility cost and low starting credibility. Anyone who knows the lore laughs. Anyone who doesn’t picks it up in two rounds.
The satire is non-partisan on purpose. I’ve handed the beta to people on opposite ends of the political spectrum, and they’ve all enjoyed it for the same reason — government opacity around this stuff is one of the few things both sides are genuinely exhausted by. I’m not interested in disclosing my own politics through the deck. The deck makes fun of the discourse, not the audience.
The manila envelope
My wife bought me a stack of padded white envelopes for my birthday and said, “you could send these out in these — nondescript, no markings.” That was the project’s other founding moment.
I’d been assembling the first batch of beta packets — starter deck, rule sheet, a deliberately shady letter written as if from an insider who didn’t want to be named — when the envelopes showed up as a birthday gift. The whole distribution story snapped into place around them. Mailers go out plain, no branding, the recipient experience is closer to a leak than a launch. Co-conspirator credit to my wife on that one. The current run uses manila instead of white — I switched once I’d worked through her stash — but the spirit is the same.
The terminal
The feedback site is an 80s CRT mock-up at redacted-2393-fwiw.netlify.app. It was my favorite part of the build, and Claude Code one-shot the look.
Once the mailer assembly line was running, I wanted a feedback channel that matched the rest of the bit. I sketched a CRT terminal session, talked it through with Claude Code, and had the form built and live inside a day. Claude understood the brief on the first pass — green-on-black, scanlines, input fields styled as command prompts. I added a header graphic I’d generated in MidJourney — an Apple II / Oregon-Trail-style pixel rendering of the U.S. Capitol — and the package came together. Secret decoder ring vibe, minus the requirement to drink Ovaltine.
The URL — redacted-2393-fwiw.netlify.app — is whatever Netlify provisioned. I liked how cryptic and meaningless it read against the rest of the bit, so I never replaced it. The 80s framing fits the broader IP for a structural reason too: the game pulls from the entire UFO lore timeline without bothering to honor when any of it happened. An 80s UI grounds the whole thing in a vintage that makes the BS feel more real.
The art
~60 cards, two months of bedside-laptop nights next to my wife and my tiny daughter asleep in her bassinet, in MidJourney without SREF codes — the long way.
The visual direction was 90s Image Comics — Gen 13, Spawn, that kind of saturation and silhouette. I wrote prompts through a custom GPT I’d set up for the project, supplied reference photos for the real-world targets where the satire needed them, and ran the iterations. Two months on art generation, another two-to-three weeks of layout in Affinity. (I was mad at Adobe at the time and used the project as an excuse to get properly acquainted with Affinity’s tools. I’ve since softened on Adobe — they’re too big to be brilliant, not malicious — and I’d probably hand-illustrate the final card back in Illustrator if Redacted ever flips to a wide release.)
A fair amount of art got reworked once the card-template constraints came into focus. What’s in the beta is the third or fourth pass on most of the cards. I now have at least three SREF codes saved in SMC that would land this visual style in days instead of months — the gap between this project and a hypothetical Redacted built today is the cleanest before/after I’ve got for what SREF discovery actually saves a designer.
About the name
Redacted: Disclosure is Eminent — a pun. Disclosure always feels imminent. Whether the truth ever actually surfaces depends on someone eminent deciding it should.
I can’t pinpoint when the working title — Conspiracy: The UFO Card Game, which is how it shows up in the original Manus research doc — got swapped for Redacted. I was surprised to find the old title still in the file when I dug it up. Redacted is what most disclosure ends up looking like anyway, which made the rename tonal as well as brand-y.
Where it stands
Paused — but only for cost, and only at the promotional-site layer. The beta is live, the feedback form is live, and the rebuild is in my head.
I shut the promotional site down when its annual Framer reup hit, after my departure from Halo Media — too many irons in the fire to justify the bill on a project I wasn’t actively pushing. The plan, when I come back to it, is to rebuild the promo presence as flat HTML on cheap or free CI/CD hosting, and to lean into the CRT-terminal aesthetic that already runs the feedback site. The game itself doesn’t need a normal marketing site. It needs a portal.
Beta decks still ship by request. The feedback form still receives entries. If you want one, you know where to write.
What this was actually about
The first complete IP I’ve ever worldbuilt, illustrated, manufactured, and shipped — alone, in six months, with an agent on concept, MidJourney on art, my wife on distribution, and Claude on the terminal.
Redacted is the longest sustained creative project I’ve finished and the only one where the entire stack — research, mechanics, characters, art, layout, packaging, distribution, feedback channel — sat on my desk and nobody else’s. The lesson it carries forward is about scope: I can take a half-drunk one-liner from my brother and ride it out into a printed, illustrated, satirically coherent product without an external producer, art director, or publisher in the loop. The economics of that didn’t matter for the beta. They’ll matter when I decide whether to do this for real.
For now: paused, not parked. The envelopes are still in the closet.