Findlay native publishes cultural card game

FINDLAY — "Travel the globe — no airfare required" is the catchphrase of Findlay native Cindy Stefan's card game, Culture Treks. Four hundred and fifty playing cards are split between five categories: superstitions, holidays and festivals, food and drink, do's and taboos and finally, customs. A die is rolled to choose which category to draw a card from. Each card has a unique fact about a culture, with three countries to guess from. A player gets one chance to answer correctly. If they do, they keep the card. If they don't answer correctly, the card is placed at the bottom of the deck. The first player to collect one card from each category wins. Facts about 90 countries — at least one from each continent, except Antarctica — are featured in the game. The game can be played with two to six people and takes around 60 minutes to complete. Stefan said her original idea for Culture Treks was to make it into a board game. "It was boring just to have a book. So I turned it into a game, which was actually a big board game," she said. "At first the answers were handwritten. The cards were on index cards. It just took a lot of time to make this." Fast forward 27 years, Stefan's daughter, Sierra, decided it was time for the duo to bring the card game to life. "She did all the graphics, the website, and all the communication with the company in China that made the game," Stefan said. "It wouldn't have happened without her." Stefan, an ESL teacher of many years, is an avid traveler. Culture Treks started out as a book called "Tips for Teachers and Travelers: Cross Cultural Awareness," created for her master's thesis in the 1990s. Facts about different countries were collected from her trips around the globe and international students in her classes. "My dad took me traveling. We went to Egypt, Jordan and Israel when I was in junior high school. That was life impacting because Egypt was crazy. Just so culturally different than here," Stefan said. "That left a big impression on me." Stefan and her daughter have about 1,000 copies of Culture Treks, and are slowly making sales by word-of-mouth. The current challenge is to get Culture Treks "on the map." "It's not really selling because people don't know what it is," she said. "It would really help if some big travel person, like Rick Steves, would endorse it. Then we get a lot more sales." Cards with facts about the United States are included in the categories, Stefan said, so international players can feel like they're learning, too. "They can learn what a potluck is, or about the tooth fairy. Things that are uniquely USA," she explained. "(There are) no losers, only learners," Stefan said. "Nobody ends up feeling stupid or like they've lost. It's just a lot of laughter." One of Stefan's overarching goals with Culture Treks is to bring people together, to "to open, broaden people's minds about cultural differences," she said. "There's no right or wrong, it's just different." Visit https://culturetreksgame.com/ to learn more about the game or to purchase a copy. Culture Treks is also available to purchase on Amazon.