Boost: The Collectible Card Game

Your favorite C++ library is a card now. By the end of a match, you'll actually know what it does.

The job: bolt a handful of libraries into a working Feature, force it through QA, and finish before the player across the table buries you under Segfault, a Production Outage, and a Deadline Crunch timed for maximum damage.

The libraries behave exactly like they do at work, which is the whole lesson. Your Web Server runs fast and scales beautifully and cannot stay up for ten minutes, because everything networking has the reliability of a wet handshake. Your hash map is faster than anything on the table and has strong, confident, incorrect opinions about ordering. Your Bloom filter probably has your data. You win by learning which library's strengths cover another's weaknesses, which is real engineering judgment smuggled inside a card game.

Two ways to play

Play Casual and it's a five-minute knife fight. Flip on Strict Mode and the dependency tree wakes up: nothing ships until the things it depends on are already down. It teaches how C++ software is actually assembled, and it does it by making you feel the pain directly, which is the only way anyone ever learns it.

Every card is a doorway

Every card carries a QR code to the library's real documentation, so the moment something makes you curious, you're one scan from the actual docs. A match is a genuine on-ramp to the Boost ecosystem wearing a knife fight as a disguise. Ideal for the student who's heard of Boost, the new hire who hasn't, and the veteran who wants to watch them figure it out.

From the C++ Alliance, with original art by Bob Ostrom and jokes by people who've lost a weekend to a build system.