This post originally appeared on Kotaku.

An entrepreneur in Dallas got in touch with me last month saying he had a product called Political Prisoners of China Playing Cards, asking if I’d like to review them. Chinese political prisoners. Playing cards. Dallas. I live in Beijing. It made no sense. How could I say no?

To field test, I got in touch with a dissident. We met for lunch with a pair of mutual friends at the popular hang-out Fodder Factory in Caochangdi art district.

You might not recognize the name Wang Zhongxia, but authorities do. As Wang tells it, he was first made aware of China’s internal security apparatus when agents interrogated him in 2007 for participating in Chinese democracy online forums while he was a student at People’s University of China. He signed Liu Xiaobo’s Charter 08 in December 2008, again attracting unwelcome attention, and three months later police issued a warrant to search his house. They seized his laptop, a flash drive, a book by Hu Ping, and T-shirts featuring images of Liu Xiaobo, Chen Guangcheng and Hu Jia (Wang made them; here he is modeling one).

That year, the 20th anniversary of the June Fourth Incident, Wang was placed under house arrest from May 27 to June 8. He was detained for 23 days in 2010 after Liu won the Nobel Peace Prize, and again in 2011, possibly to keep him from commemorating Liu’s birthday (Wang said authorities never told him). “Being a political prisoner is something that stays with you for whole life,” he said. He admitted that he was scared after his initial encounter with the Public Security Bureau, but his desire to speak out simply overpowered his fears.

The cards themselves arrived in a standard card-sized box in plastic shrink wrap, obviously professionally made and — it became clear after a conversation with creator Grant Shepard — carefully conceived.

“This was really a labor of love,” Shepard said, describing how he’d return from work at 5ish, put the kids to bed, then coordinate with two designers in Indonesia from 9 pm to 2 am. There was lots of trial and error. There were interviews with human rights experts, facilitated by Rick Halperin of Southern Methodist University and Jennifer Holmes of University of Texas at Dallas (who’s a board member on the Bill of Rights Defense Committee). A pool of 100 Chinese dissidents was whittled to 40, and finally to 13, one for each card value from 2 to King, with a special image for the Ace of Spades.

“I feel like if any region needs to allow its citizens to freely collaborate and communicate, it’s China. If it does, they’re going to take advantage of the biggest goldmine of talent that the world has ever seen,” said Shepard, who’s always been fascinated by China. He has yet to visit but would like to soon. “I’d like to get these [cards] to China someday, but that is probably not a realistic short-term goal. The goal is to make one ponder, inspect, and want to learn more.”

Possessing one of these decks here, of course, will not get you detained. Believe it or not, police have better things to do. But it’s equally clear that you’d be foolish to try selling them alongside cigarettes on, say, the streets. Peering off the laminated cards are the likes of Tan Zuoren, who petitioned the government following the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake; Shi Tao, who disclosed state secrets and was ratted out by Yahoo; and lesser-known individuals including 1989 Tiananmen demonstrators, minority leaders, religious dissidents, writers and bloggers. All the dissidents are peaceful, Shepard noted. The Ace of Spades is Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel laureate who is five years into an 11-year sentence for subversion.

Now the real question for the potential customer: how do the cards play?

Our game of choice was the Chinese classic Zhengshangyou (争上游), or Big Two. I shuffled and we did the Chinese thing of taking turns grabbing cards off the top. Almost immediately, Wang noticed that the Queen — land rights activist Ni Yulan — had actually been released from prison in early October. Whistleblower Shi Tao — the 10 — is also out, released in August.

Wang puzzled over the 2-card, Zhiwen Wang — “This guy seems important but I don’t know him,” he said. (He later googled; Zhiwen Wang is a Falun Gong practitioner.) The 2 happens to be the highest value in Big Two; knowing my opponent had one certainly helped my position. So did card-playing savvy: despite a weak hand, I finished second, just ahead of Wang.

The cards were… good. They played like any normal deck. I dealt the second game –snatching is slow — and the cards slid just the right distance (whatever that distance might be). To nitpick a little, in several versions of Big Two, the relative size of the jokers matter, i.e. red or black, and in the political prisoners deck, both jokers are red. A shrewd player should recognize Xi Jinping as “bigger” than Hu Jintao — current vs. former president, for those not caught up on Chinese politics — but outfitting Hu with a black vest would’ve cleared up any confusion.

“I think it’s a good way for people to know prisoners in China,” Wang said. “But actually, this set only includes 13 people — that’s too few. Fifty or 40 would be okay. With only 13, the choices can be questioned.”

And indeed, he began questioning. “Recently the leadership has arrested too many people,” he said, naming Xu Zhiyong, detained in July for gathering “crowds to disrupt public order,” andWang Gongquan, a member of the New Citizens Movement. Increased censorship over the past three months, especially in social media, has magnified the chilling effect on exchange, too. Of course, if Wang is any indication, there’ll be no shortage of expression. In other words, Shepard might not lack candidates to fill out an entire deck in the future.

Wang did slightly better in our second game. He beat me, sliding Zhiwen Wang across the table with his final play.

~

What: Playing cards, laminated, professsional and complete (reciprocal images so you never have to turn the cards in your hands, one-eyed jacks, suicide kings, etc.). Original artwork from three designers.

Cost: $7 (limited time only)

You’ll want to buy if… You want to impress friends or a particular someone with some “real talk” about China over beer, tequila shots, and vodka cocktails while playing Kings Cup.

You’ll not want to buy if… You’ve ever gotten on the wrong side of the China’s Public Security Bureau, are paranoid about real or perceived contraband, or work in a Chinese diplomatic setting. Also, if you hold any particular grudge against these people…

Liu Xiaobo
Zhiwen Wang
Kong Youping
Gulmira Imin
Xi Chen
Zhu Yufu
Alimujiang Yimiti
Chen Wei
Hada
Shi Tao
Tan Zuoren
Ni Yulan
Gao Zhisheng

…you may not be completely happy with this product.

Political Prisoners of China Playing Cards can be purchased here. World Freedom Products founder Grant Shepard encourages interested retailers to contact him directly at sales@worldfreedomproducts.com.

Chinese Valentine’s Day, i.e. the Magpie Festival and Double Seventh Festival, is today, and to celebrate, Google.com.hk has animated a doodle game featuring the cowherd and the weaver girl from the famous tale of love and loss, The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd.

In the story, a cowherd and weaver girl — a goddess’s daughter — are forbidden to see each other, and are separated by the Milky Way. Once a year, however, magpies form a “bridge of magpies” so that the lovers can spend the seventh night of the seventh lunar month with one another.

The objective of the game is simple: drag the colored magpies into place to form a bridge.

Otherwise, watch the poor lovers fall into the desolate sea of stars and be unhappy.

(H/T Katie)

It’s 2.6 GB, but if you have the disk space and five hours to spare, go here to download Glorious Mission Online, a first-person shooter you’ll be hearing a lot more about in the coming hours and days.

Glorious Mission is the People’s Liberation Army’s military simulation, developed by the Chinese company Giant Interactive Group. A few years ago, it was used as a training and leisure program for real, actual Chinese soldiers. Now, it’s a free, downloadable game that lets players try their hand at defending the Diaoyu Islands.

The game was released on Thursday, on the anniversary of the founding of the PLA.

Reports Reuters:

The PLA was interested in having a 3D interactive game for simulations with virtual replicas of their weapons, said Richard Chiang, a spokesman for Giant Interactive.

“The military was 100 percent behind this game,” he said. “Rather than playing the same foreign games like Call of Duty and being American Marines shooting Russians or whatnot, Chinese can actually play as Chinese soldiers.”

A term you’ll hear throughout the game is guizi, referring to the “Japanese devils” who occupied China during World War II.

“The guizi are coming!” warns the game in a scenario where players are tasked with defending a World War Two-era Shanghai and its cultural artefacts from Japanese invaders.

“The guizi have been obliterated!” Glorious Mission congratulates the player after a grenade explodes under the last enemy’s feet. Shanghai’s museums are saved.

Yes, save the museums. Save the motherland. Capture those rocks in the East China Sea.

If you get tired of Glorious Mission (and why would you get tired of it?), we recommend Defense of the Diaoyu Islands. It’s not really the same kind of game, but when the objective is to kill Japanese, what does it matter?

UPDATE, 8/6, 12:32 am: Caveat emptor. As sent along by reader Joel M:

Beijing will host the World Sudoku Championship, reports China Daily. “The Eighth World Sudoku Championship will be an eight-day battle of wits” starting October 12.

This will be China’s first time holding this prestigious event, which will feature more than 300 competitors from 30 countries and regions, apparently.

“To hold the championship in Beijing will greatly encourage Sudoku popularity among community sports,” Zhang Fengchao, president of the Beijing Olympic City Development Foundation, said.

The event will be held alongside the 22nd World Puzzle Championship. Being underdogs, perhaps Chinese competitors will do slightly better at putting numbers in boxes than mahjong.

The event will be held at the Chateau Laffitte Hotel in Changping District, which I guess looks like this:

International Sudoku: polo for those who don’t like horses.

Register your team here.

It’s a slow news day.

We thank and curse Kotaku for alerting us to the game “Defense of the Diaoyu Islands,” hosted on Chinese Global Times’s website, wherein a player takes control of a Chinese warship that must kill as many Japanese enemies as possible before inevitable failure.

It’s interesting, but what a time suck.

“Defence of the Diaoyu Islands takes after pretty much every single screen scrolling shooter from Raiden to Ikaruga,” explains Eric Jou. “Basically the player takes control of a Chinese ‘Diaoyu Island’ patrol ship for the purpose of defending the Diaoyu Island!”

Or as one Reddit commenter put it, “All this taught me is that the Japanese Navy is fucking badass.”

Two keys for getting a high score:

1. Level up on weapons, preferably the laser.

2. Hitting space bar will destroy all enemies on screen.

30,900 is my high score. Reddit’s platypusmusic has 50,000. And yours?

A cheeky someone over at JeopardyLabs, where quiz fans can create their own Jeopardy! game (not to be confused with J-Archive, which has every Jeopardy! question ever), has created a game for China watchers who love talking about pollution. It’s mostly lame, with several true/false and fill-in-the-blank questions that don’t require the answer in the form of a question, but that such a quiz exists is the point.

Anywhere from one to twelve teams can take part in the 25-question round, featuring Q’s such as:

• The number of registered cars has increased from 3 million to what from 2008 to 2011.
• How many of the world’s 20 cities with the worst air quality are located in China?
• What is the most heavily polluted city in China?

This got us thinking. What other China-themed Jeopardy! categories need to exist?

• International Schools
• Potables… Or Not
• Cancer
• “Rule By Law”
• The Rapists

And so on. Someone make this happen.

(H/T @MyHealthBeijing)