Make Purple! Profoundly Poignant or Pointlessly Profound?

Originally published in The Fine Print Daily (Winter 2024, Jackson, MS). Digital adaptation appears with permission, courtesy of staff writer Joseph Turner.

In an era where tabletop gaming often drowns in its own complexity—where rulebooks rival medieval manuscripts in length and turning orders require flowcharts—a curious contradiction emerges from the creative depths of Mississippi. It arrives in the form of a question that is simultaneously simple and profound: What if we just made purple?

The answer, it turns out, is MAKE PURPLE!, a new tabletop experience that dares to ask whether gaming has strayed too far from its essential nature, or perhaps not far enough into the realm of pure abstraction. The game’s creator, Opie Cooper, sits across from me in his studio, methodically flipping cards from non-purple to purple as we speak.

“The beauty of MAKE PURPLE! lies in its uncompromising vision,” Cooper explains, his hands never ceasing their rhythmic card-turning. “We’ve stripped away everything that doesn’t serve the core purpose. There are no victory points to calculate, no resources to manage, no alliances to forge or betray. There is only purple, and the absence of purple.”

Not so much ‘Rules,’ more like ‘Mandatory Guides’

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The game’s mechanics are deceptively straightforward: players must turn all 52 cards in the deck purple-side up. Yet within this simplicity lies layers of what Cooper calls “collective intentionality”—a synchronized effort that culminates in the mandatory group exclamation of “MAKE PURPLE!” followed by its triumphant counterpart, “MADE PURPLE!”

“The sacred yell isn’t just a rule,” Cooper notes, pausing briefly to align a slightly askew card. “It’s a declaration of purpose, a moment of shared consciousness. When was the last time you truly unified with other humans in the pursuit of anything? Much less making something purple?”

Indeed, what at first glance might seem like an exercise in minimalism reveals itself as something more nuanced—a mirror reflecting our gaming community’s expectations back at itself.

The Sacred Art of Numeric Precision

The development process was rigorous. The seven-shuffle requirement wasn’t arrived at arbitrarily—though one might reasonably wonder if it was. “Seven shuffles. Not six. Not eight,” Cooper emphasizes, his voice carrying the weight of countless playtest sessions. “This isn’t guesswork; it’s science. Also, faith.”

The game is kicked off by dispersing the cards somewhat chaoticly onto the table or floor between the players, but Opie is careful to point out that there’s more to it than just “tossing” them down.

“Players don’t simply toss cards. The cards are scattered with purpose.” clarified Opie, adding, “And physics. Mostly physics.”

The game can be played with anywhere from 1 to 52 players, a range that Cooper explains was carefully calculated. “We originally considered allowing up to 74 players, but didn’t,” he says with a tone that implied it was one of many tough choices.

Purpose VS Purple? Or, perhaps, Purpose LOVES Purple?

As our conversation deepens, so too does the paradox at the heart of MAKE PURPLE! Is it a brilliant commentary on the state of modern gaming, or is it simply about turning cards purple? The answer, perhaps, is both—or neither. The game steadfastly refuses to acknowledge any inherentness in its premise, and therein lies its genius.

The Kickstarter campaign, launching spring of 2025, offers what Cooper calls “the essential MAKE PURPLE! experience”—52 cards, purple on one side, deliberately non-purple on the other, accompanied by a rulebook printed with what are assured to be “real words, on paper, for authenticity.”

“Some people might ask why this needs to be a Kickstarter,” Cooper reflects, finally finishing his methodical card-flipping. “Those people are asking the wrong question. The real question is: why doesn’t this need to not be a Kickstarter?”

As our interview concludes, Cooper leads me in one final round of MAKE PURPLE! The cards scatter across his desk with purpose, not chaos. We flip them, one by one, until the moment of truth arrives. Our “MAKE PURPLE!” shout echoes off the walls, followed by the inevitable “MADE PURPLE!” And in that moment, something ineffable shifts in the universe. The cards are, indeed, all purple.

Whether MAKE PURPLE! represents the future of tabletop gaming or its logical endpoint remains to be seen. What’s clear is that it exists, unapologetically and with precision, in a space between satire and sincerity that few games dare to occupy. In a world of countless games about everything, perhaps we finally have a game about something—or nothing—or everything.

The only certainty? Purple. Maybe.

The Fine Print Daily has documented Mississippi’s most deliberate decisions since 1975, steadfastly avoiding digital distractions in favor of purposefully pressed paper. Our mission remains unchanged: to illuminate the profound within the obvious, and occasionally, the obvious within the profound. We’re not just news—we’re news that requires reading glasses. Read our other articles kindly digitized by the Causality Loop team here.