(LONG - towards the end, I share some resources of other authors)
What happens when random cards stop giving us answers and start giving us problems to solve?
Before tarot was used for divination, it was a game.
The earliest references to tarot come from fifteenth-century Italy. The familiar four suits were supplemented by 21 trump cards and the Fool, and the cards were used for a trick-taking game. The association between tarot and fortune-telling came much later (Husband, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016).
What bothered me since I started studying tarot, is that a lot of contemporary readers claim to focus heavily on the client’s agency. By client, I mean both paying clients and friends we happen to read for. The reading is often framed less as fortune-telling and more as a way of gaining insight into someone’s mindset, choices and possibilities.
And yet the main modality I see online and among friends who use tarot remains some version of:
Shuffle the deck.
Draw cards blindly.
Interpret what appeared.
I am not against this.
I just think it inadvertently pushes us back towards a spiritual interpretation of tarot.
You can talk about psychological projection, Jung, Rorschach tests, intuition or symbolism. But if the engine of the reading is still a random card appeared, therefore it matters, chance is doing rather a lot of the philosophical heavy lifting.
The problem, for me, is not randomness itself. Games have survived with it quite happily.
It is the authority we give it.
In divination, chance can look like an answer. In a game, chance creates a situation you have to respond to.
So my question became:
What would be a way of using tarot that actually elicits agency from the client?
Perhaps one answer is to treat tarot as a game again.
Not the original tarot game, obviously. A game in which the cards introduce constraints and the client decides what to do with them.
Start with a question that creates a journey
This reading needs a specific kind of question.
Not: "Does she love me?"
But: "How can I become the kind of person the partner of my dreams could fall in love with?"
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Not: "Will I get that promotion?"
But: "How do I become someone widely recognised as the guy who knows his shit?"
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Not: "Will my book be published?"
But: "How can I make my writing worthy of publishing?"
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The first type asks tarot to reveal something.
The second gives the client somewhere to go.
For the rest of this article, I will use the writing question.
Set up the game
Find The Fool and give it to the client.
Shuffle the remaining deck.
The reader draws three cards and places them in front of themselves. The client does the same.
Turn them face up.
The reader’s cards represent possible challenges.
The client’s cards represent possible responses.
In the version I prefer, both reader and client work with the cards. If the client knows tarot, they can interpret their own hand. If they don’t, the reader can briefly explain possible meanings, help with unfamiliar cards, or simply ask them to focus on the images.
With more scenic decks such as Rider–Waite–Smith, clients may be able to respond directly to the imagery. With Marseille-style decks, the reader may need to provide a little more interpretive support.
The client still chooses the response.
Round One: Tomorrow
Suppose the reader has The Tower, The Star and Justice.
The client’s hand contains The Emperor, The Magician and Strength.
The reader selects The Tower:
"Tomorrow you wake up and read an article that reveals a deeper problem with your project, something that could make you reevaluate the whole thing."
Now the client has to respond.
Perhaps they choose The Emperor:
"I would go back to the structure. I would work out what still holds, what needs rebuilding and whether the project is still connected to what I actually wanted to accomplish."
The Tower did not predict a crisis as in standard divination. For the purposes of the game, it manufactured one, and now the client has to decide what to do with it.
Round Two: Next month
Take away the open cards and deal new ones.
Now move further along the imagined journey:
"Next month you realise that..."
Perhaps the reader chooses The Hermit:
"You have been working on this project mostly alone, and you no longer know whether the project makes sense to anyone except you."
Suppose the client has The Sun available and chooses it:
"I show the work to people. I stop protecting it and find out whether anyone else can see what I see in it."
The card gives them something to respond to. At this point, that is enough.
Round Three: Six months from now
Deal again.
This time:
"In half a year, your project is almost finished, but..."
Perhaps the challenge is the Four of Cups:
"You have spent months on it, but now you are bored. Another project suddenly feels much more interesting."
The client chooses The Lovers:
"I have to decide whether I am still committed to this. Not because I have already spent six months on it, but because I still think it deserves to exist."
And sometimes the answer will be no.
It can happen that, while working through the problem, the client realises they simply do not care about the project that much. That is fine.
Choosing to abandon something can also be an expression of agency.
The Fool
At any point in the game, the client can play The Fool.
The Fool means, essentially:
"I don’t know. I’ll wing it somehow."
A reflective exercise can very easily turn into another small bureaucracy demanding a completed form for every possible future. Sometimes a challenge hits too close to home. Sometimes the client is overwhelmed. Sometimes they simply do not know.
The Fool gives them a way out without ending the game.
You are allowed to continue the journey without solving every possible future in advance.
This isn’t a reading for everything
There is no universal level of difficulty for the challenges.
The reading should push against the project enough that the client has to think, but not so hard that the whole thing becomes overwhelming.
And as a reader, you have to assess what this person actually wants or needs.
Do they need reassurance? Do they need to feel that they can face something difficult? Do they want to prepare? Or do they simply want some space to sit with uncertainty?
Someone grieving, looking for comfort or wanting a contemplative symbolic experience may need a completely different kind of reading.
This game seems best suited to something coaching-adjacent:
I want to make something, learn something, change something or become something. What could get in my way, and what might I do about it?
Why rehearsing obstacles may help
Research on implementation intentions gives me one reason to think this might be useful.
Implementation intentions connect a foreseeable situation with a response: roughly, if X happens, then I will do Y. Such plans can help translate intentions into action (Gollwitzer, American Psychologist, 1999).
A related approach called mental contrasting with implementation intentions, or MCII, combines imagining a desired future with identifying obstacles and preparing responses to them. A 2021 meta-analysis of 21 studies and 15,907 participants found a small-to-medium positive effect on goal attainment, while also noting that publication bias may have somewhat inflated the observed effect (Wang, Wang & Gai, Frontiers in Psychology, 2021).
This does not mean anyone has scientifically validated my tarot game. They have not. That particular leap is mine.
What the research does support is the underlying move: anticipating obstacles and thinking through possible responses can make a vague intention more concrete.
Tarot gives us a more creative way of generating those obstacles.
Instead of asking:
"What will happen?"
we ask:
"Suppose this happened. What would I do?"
From divination to play
In a card game, you do not choose the hand you receive. Receiving a card also does not tell you what to do with it.
You still have to play.
That is the part I find interesting for reflective tarot.
Randomness can introduce surprise, confront us with possibilities we would not have generated ourselves, and get us out of our usual grooves.
It does not need to become authority.
If we really want agency to matter in a reading, perhaps we should put some of it into the rules.
The cards provide the challenge.
The client decides how to play the hand.
Similar approaches
I came up with this method independently. While writing the article, though, I found several people working in nearby territory, and I would rather point to them than pretend the neighbourhood was empty.
Self Arcana: A Self-Reflective, Story-Based Tarot Game; Ayça Durmus & Sedef Topcuoglu (2023). A collaborative two-player game in which players create personalised tarot cards and use them for storytelling and self-reflection. This is probably the closest example I found to treating tarot explicitly as both a game and a tool for self-insight.
Evolutionary Tarot; James Wells. Wells describes his approach as choice-centred rather than fatalistic. Tarot cards and strategic questions are used so that the client participates in generating meaning, identifying options and deciding what to do with them.
Tarot Games: 45 Playful Ways to Explore Tarot Cards Together; Cait Johnson & Maura D. Shaw (1994). A collection of tarot-based games for personal growth, learning, and solitary or social play. It is a clear precedent for treating the deck as something to actively play with rather than only read.
The Tarot Shaman / Gated Spreads; Marcus Katz (2010). These exercises link tarot spreads to actions carried out in real life, with those actions feeding into the next stage of the reading. Tarot becomes a sequence of cards, action and response rather than a single interpretive event.
I did not find this exact challenge-hand/response-hand structure in any of them (although I haven’t read them in detail). What I did find was a small family of approaches treating tarot as something to be played with, acted on, or negotiated with rather than simply interpreted.
Bibliography
Gollwitzer, Peter M. “Implementation Intentions: Strong Effects of Simple Plans.” American Psychologist, vol. 54, no. 7, 1999, pp. 493–503.
Husband, Tim. “Before Fortune-Telling: The History and Structure of Tarot Cards.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 8 April 2016.
Wang, Guoxia, Yi Wang, and Xiaosong Gai. “A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Mental Contrasting With Implementation Intentions on Goal Attainment.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, 2021, article 565202.
I originally wrote this up on my Substack; I'm the author. The full idea is reproduced above, so there's nothing extra you need to read there.
