JPCatholic Alumni Follow Success of The Catholic Card Game with Another Party Game

This past spring, alumni couple Matt and Lisa (Spehar) Martinusen launched a new card game called Catholics Who Don’t Do Anything, following up on the success of their popular 2018 release The Catholic Card Game.

Matt and Lisa both graduated from JPCatholic in 2015; Matt with a degree in Entrepreneurial Business, and Lisa in Communications Media. The couple met at JPCatholic and are now married with three kids. Alongside his full-time job in media and marketing, Matt also started and runs a gaming company Board Catholic, which he describes as “providing opportunity for community with Catholic fandom.”

In 2018, the Martinusens applied their unique brand of humor to create The Catholic Card Game, a prompt-and-answer game similar to Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity, but with a Catholic focus. “We took a popular game and made it appropriate to our audience,” Martinusen said. “I came up with an idea for a game at like 4:00 one morning. My wife and I planned it all out, and put it on Kickstarter to see what would happen – the rest is history.”

In the next month, over 600 Kickstarter backers funded their project with nearly $30,000. Since then, the game continues to be popular in Catholic circles, and the Martinusens have launched several expansion packs in partnership with personalities and ministries including Tomics, the Crunch, Matt Fradd, Fr. Mike Schmitz, Catching Foxes, and Life Teen. They also recently released a Quarantine expansion pack as a free print-and-play.

This year, the Martinusens have followed up on that success with another party game titled Catholics Who Don’t Do Anything. Released in April, the game is a Catholic version of Never Have I Ever, or Ten Fingers. The game “creates the opportunity to laugh about the funny things we do as Catholics living in the world (but certainly not of it).”

Matt was inspired to produce these card games because he feels that young Catholic millennials are very under-served when it comes to Catholic entertainment and media. “Almost all Catholic products and services that are put out there are either for older generations, not for millennials, or they’re catechetical. This is fine when you want to help kids remember their sacraments, but no one has transitioned out of that.”

He adds, “My games are for people who love their faith, not necessarily for evangelization or teaching. I’m not trying to teach anybody, I’m just trying to let people have fun with their faith… It’s like Catholic fandom; there’s Marvel fandom, Game of Thrones fandom, but people want to show their Catholic fandom... Both games are full of inside jokes that Catholics will get and can have fun with.”

The Martinusens also have a third release in the works, a charade-style game called The Catholic Family Game. The Kickstarter is scheduled to launch on August 3rd.

For more information and to purchase, visit The Catholic Card Game and The Catholics Who Don’t Do Anything.