The Iceberg

2024
Deck of cards, gameboard, table, chairs
Created by Abigail Simon & Marina Zurkow

THE ICEBERG is a card and conversation game created by Abigail Simon and Marina Zurkow that invites players to consider the beautiful trouble of complexity, with a particular focus on climate change. Like a tarot deck, the images on the cards of The Iceberg invite the user to consider a problem, give a voice to it, and reconnect with it with eyes wider open than before. By allowing the cards to create associations between unexpected spaces—The Big Blue Marble and antidepressants, or Pizzagate and the bloom boom of Poison Ivy— The Iceberg gives participants a voice in the story, and a way to not only share questions but also experience.

The Gameboard

24″ x 36″ gameboard showing card backs

Card Suits

The experience of The Iceberg is similar to a Rorschach test. The game board is laid out with a deck composed of 4 suits: Heroes and Villains, Profit From Loss, Thoughts, and Allegories. Participants draw a card from each suit and lay it on the board. Participants are then invited to respond, interpret and describe what they see. As the player responds to the emergent, sometimes contradictory story lines and attempts to articulate the connections in their “reads,” it quickly becomes apparent that our default positions —whether virtue signals, convictions, or frustrated denial—are more entangled than they seem.