Five gates. Every card. No exceptions.
We help people connect more deeply with the ones they love — by turning the life you've already lived together into the game you play together.
Most decks are written to be good. Ours have to be good AND survive this. Every card the Beacon Engine drafts goes through five gates. A card that fails one doesn't get rewritten — it gets killed, and we draft another.
Gate 1 — Ownership. “Could any other table play this card?”
Closeness doesn't come from questions. It comes from shared, specific, co-owned memory — the stuff only the people at this table were there for. Generic questions produce generic answers, and a table that's performing rather than remembering never actually arrives anywhere.
“What's your favourite family tradition?” — every family alive can answer this, which is exactly why it changes nothing.
Silently rate the 6-hour jam, 1–10, as a disaster. Within one of each other? Both advance 2.
Gate 2 — Mechanic. “Is it a game, or is it homework?”
This gate solves the thing every conversation deck quietly fails at: the person who needs the conversation most is the one who won't take the prompt. Direct emotional questions raise a defence — nobody wants to perform sincerity for the table. A mechanic removes that. The uncle who'd deflect “what are you most proud of?” will absolutely cast a vote or argue a verdict to win two squares — and the story comes out inside the game, on his terms, mid-laugh. Play lowers the cost of being seen. Mechanics are our Trojan horse for the good part.
“Tell the story of the night the turkey burned.” — one person talks, four people wait.
Everyone writes down who's really to blame for the 2019 turkey. Reveal at once. Majority verdict: the accused loses 2. Split table: the accused advances 2, and gets to gloat.
Gate 3 — Resolution. “Does it end?”
A card that stalls the table hoping someone laughs punishes exactly the tables that need it most — the quiet ones, the new in-law, the teenager. Ambiguity is a tax paid by whoever is least comfortable in the room. Every card resolves into a table state: someone moved, someone won, something got said. Nobody has to be the brave one.
Gate 4 — Arc. “Earned, or ambushed?”
Light opens. Personal builds. Heartfelt lands. This isn't taste. Disclosure works by reciprocal escalation — it deepens only when it's gradual and mutual, and it reverses when it's forced. A deck that goes deep on card three doesn't get depth; it gets a table that closes for the night. The best-known closeness experiment in psychology works precisely because it climbs, in stages, and lets both sides climb together. So every card is placed, not just written.
Gate 5 — The Owner's Gate. “The last gate is yours.”
All 52 cards land in your inbox before anything prints. You know which memory is still tender. You know which joke is only funny to two of you. You are the only person alive who can pass this gate, so we hand it to you. Don't like a card? We redraw it. Don't like the deck? We redraw the deck.
Conversation starters hand you a question and hope. We hand you your own story.
| Row | A deck off the shelf $25–35 | StoryBeacon Expert Deck $29 · plays tonight | The Journey of Us from $58 · board + anchored deck |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Questions printed a million times | A curated format for the night you're having | A board of your life, and a deck drafted from it |
| You choose | Nothing | The night, the challenge types, the tone, the names | The night — then you tell us the life, and we build it |
| Knows your names | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Knows your places, your people, the argument you never settled | ✗ | ✗ — and it doesn't pretend to | ✓ It's made of them |
| Every card is a game, and every card resolves | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Deliberate arc — light opens, personal builds, heartfelt lands | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| You approve all 52 before print | n/a | ✓ | ✓ |
| Your life moves on | Buy a different box about strangers | Add a format | Add a chapter to the board that already knows you |
| Could another table play it? | That's the whole idea | With their own names, yes | No. That's the entire point. |
| THE TABLE TEST | 1 of 5 gates | 4 of 5 | 5 of 5 |
Gate 1 is Ownership: could any other table play this card? No standalone deck passes it — not theirs, not ours, and we won't pretend otherwise. There's exactly one deck in the world that does, and it's the one made out of your life.
Every Expert Deck is also a lens. Buy the Couples deck to play tonight — or point it at your own story and let it curate the board.
Four of these gates apply to every deck we make. Gate 1 can only be passed by a deck built from your life — that's not a limitation of our Expert Decks, it's the definition of The Journey of Us.
The research isn't ours. It's public, and it's decades old. What's ours is a deck that actually obeys it.
Every deck is played at a real table before its format ships. Every card gets a human pass. And if the finished deck doesn't bring your table closer, we'll redraw it — or refund you.
A deck on a shelf can cite a study. We'd rather give you a guarantee.