CHUM: Blood in the Water
A Cape Cod shark party card game. The sharks are real — and your family is worse.
$31,480 pledged of $25,000 goal
612backers
126%funded
27days to go
The sharks are real — and your family is worse.
CHUM is a comedy-horror party card game for 4–10 players, played in about 20 minutes, that teaches in under ten. Everyone's stuck in one beach house while the water outside fills with fins — but the real danger is the family at the table, because one of you is quietly deciding who gets fed to the sharks.
Deal the cards, take a secret role, and press your luck round after round. Stay in the water to score — but the longer you stay, the more exposed you are when the shark hits and there are never enough life preservers to go around. Bluff, backstab, and survive the table. Somebody's getting fed. The game decides who.
Take a hand and a secret role. Press your luck and rack up your catch.
A Frenzy breaks out. Everyone's a target at once — the most panicked first.
Lunge for a life preserver before someone takes yours. There aren't enough.
The traitor's been steering it the whole time. Survive, or get eaten.
The gray seals returned to Cape Cod first — thousands of them, on the same beaches the tourists wanted. The great whites followed. Now there are tagged white sharks cruising the same shoreline where people swim, an app the locals actually check before they get in, and a coast that learned the hard way that the fin on the horizon isn't a special effect anymore.
We grew up here. We took the real thing the Cape lives with every summer and turned it into a party game about the only thing scarier than a great white: the people you're related to, trapped in one beach house, each quietly deciding who gets fed. It's never a joke about anyone who was actually hurt — the threat at our table is the family.
An 80-card deck, a punchboard token set, a Kickstarter-exclusive promo card, and a tuck box built to live in a beach bag. Plus a free companion iOS app that runs the shark, tracks the Frenzy, and settles every "did so / did not." The print novel rides along at the top tier.
The one we're launching. Hidden traitors, a beach house, and a grab for too-few life preservers. 4–10 players.
Make it your crew — your names, your inside jokes. A personalized deck, made to order.
Most backers grab both — that's the Blood in the Water tier below.
That's the problem. Every share house has them — now they're cards, and one of them is chumming the water. Sixteen archetypes in the Cape Cod edition; everyone sees themselves in one and nobody admits which.
Great WhiteThe kill.FrenzyThe scramble.DistractionThe defuse.
See the FutureThe warning.Not TodayThe refusal.A closed ladder, published in full on day one. No surprise scope, no timeline blowouts — every unlock makes your copy better without delaying it.
We're a small team that grew up on this coastline, watched the great whites come back, and decided the only sane response was to make a party game about our own families. It's been playtested at real Cape tables (and survived a few of them). The art, the cards, and the bad decisions are all ours.
Both. The great whites really did return to Cape Cod — that part is history. The game is a fictional, comedic, hidden-traitor party game built on top of that real backdrop.
No. The jokes are about the family at the table, never about anyone who was actually hurt. It's beach-town comedy-horror — the sharks are the setting; your relatives are the threat.
4–10 players, ~20 minutes a round, teachable in under ten minutes. If your group likes hidden-traitor or press-your-luck party games, you already know how to play.
The Cape Cod Edition is the one we're launching — start there. The Family Edition is a personalized version (your crew, your names, your inside jokes), made to order. Grab both at the Blood in the Water tier, which is where most backers land.
Charged separately at the pledge manager after the campaign, by zone, so you only pay your real rate. We ship US-first from a domestic hub; international opens as a late-pledge option once freight is locked.
We're planning for delivery about nine months after the campaign closes — a realistic window for a card game with proofs already in hand.