Educator Resources

Everything you need to run Tokens TCG with grades 6–8: printable cards, the supplies to gather, four ways to play, the standards behind the cards, a card lookup for students, and background reading.

At a glance

6–8Grade band

70Cards in the Alpha Set

2Players (or two teams)

10–30Minutes per game

0Screens needed

Get the cards

Print and cut

The print-and-play file has every Alpha Set card, 9 per US Letter page, with cut marks.

Free to print and use in any classroom. No cost, no sign-up.

Download the PDF (8 pages)

Print at Actual Size / 100%, not "fit to page," so cards come out at the real 2.5 × 3.5 in.
No card backs needed. Optional: slide each card into a sleeve (see What else you'll need).
One print is one full set of 70 cards.

Who gets what

Every student gets the same base set: all the Common, Uncommon, and Rare cards. Nobody starts behind on the content.

The two Chase cards (AI Isn't Magic and Alignment) are not in the base set. How students earn one is up to you: a class challenge, a quiz, a raffle, or finishing an assignment.

Rarity is the letter on each card's type bar: C, U, R, or ★ for Chase.

Building a deck

At least 25 cards.
No more than 2 copies of any card.
Cards from 1 or 2 colors only.

Choosing two colors is itself a small lesson in how the five big ideas of AI connect.

Browse the Alpha Set

What else you'll need

Needed

A way to track TokensA pencil and a sticky note for each player work well, or a 20-sided die (d20) turned to the player's score. Players add up their Tokens as they score; first to 15 wins.
Flag countersSmall markers to put on Systems when they take Flags. Math manipulatives you already have (counting cubes, chips, or bears) are perfect, or the small plastic tokens from many board games. About 10 per player.
One six-sided diePlayers roll it to see who goes first. In Launch Day, it's also the team's Drift meter, counting how far the AI has drifted.

Nice to have

Card sleevesStandard trading-card sleeves with a clear front and a solid colored back keep printed cards from tearing and make them easier to shuffle. Give everyone the same color, so no one can tell cards apart from the back.
Old trading cards as backingPrinter paper is thin. Slip an old baseball or Pokémon card into each sleeve behind the printed card, and it will feel and shuffle like a real card. The colored sleeve back hides the old card. Ask students to bring in extras they don't want.

Four ways to play

10–20 MIN · 2 PLAYERS

Quick Play

The full two-player game. Deploy AI Systems, Run Tasks to earn Tokens, and Audit your opponent's Systems. First to 15 Tokens wins.

Best once students know a few terms. Demo a few turns first.

How to Play guide

Printables

Quick Play Rules2 pages · one per table
Player Reference cards1 page · 4 cards per sheet

20–30 MIN · WHOLE CLASS

Discussion Mode: Draw the Line

No decks and no winner. Groups place 8–12 cards on a five-step line, from Totally Fine to Crosses a Line, for one setting like "helping with your homework." Then they compare and agree on a class line.

No right answers: the point is hearing why people draw their lines in different places. A good first lesson before anyone learns the rules.

Steps in brief

Lay out five headers: Totally Fine, Mostly OK, Not Really Sure, Feels Sketchy, Crosses a Line.
Pick 8–12 cards that cover the line, and one setting.
Each student places the cards alone, without talking.
Partners compare the card they disagree on most, using its Discuss question.
The class agrees where each card goes and where its line is, then photographs it.
Next time, change the setting: which cards move, and why?

Settings and card sets

Settings: helping with your homework, used by our school, in your town, for a 10-year-old, making a video for social media, at a doctor's office.
Start with: Human-in-the-Loop, AI Assistant, Built-in AI, Chatbot, Recommender, Predictor, Agent, Cognitive Offload, Data Privacy Trade-off, Deepfake.

Printables

Draw the Line teacher guide and line headers3 pages · headers: one set per group

Adapted from Align on the Line by Beck Tench & Emily Weinstein (Center for Digital Thriving, AI Pedagogy Project), CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

25–30 MIN · CO-OP

Launch Day

Players work together as the safety team at an AI company racing to launch. They win by making AI useful (45 Tokens between them) before it drifts out of control or launch day arrives.

Students feel the AI alignment problem instead of hearing it explained.

Debrief questions (2–3 min)

When did you choose safety over scoring? Was it worth it?
Which AI card was the hardest to handle, and why?
Did anyone take a shortcut that hurt the team?

Setup in brief

Shuffle every Black and Red card; deal 8 face-down as the Launch pile. The game plays it by itself.
Players build decks from White, Green, and Blue cards.
Use a six-sided die as the Drift meter, starting at 1. Past 6, the team loses.
Groups of 3–4 play as two pairs, each pair sharing a deck.

Full rules: Game Concept, Classroom use modes.

EXTENSION · DIGITAL

Side Quests

Optional, for after the game. Side Quests are short digital activities that extend what students learn at the table, with quests for each of the five big ideas in the CSTA/AI4K12 AI Learning Priorities for All K-12 Students.

Humans and AI
Representation & Reasoning
Machine Learning
Ethical AI Design
Societal Impacts of AI

Coming soon.

What students learn

The five card colors are the five categories of the CSTA/AI4K12 AI Learning Priorities for All K-12 Students. Most cards trace to a row in its Grades 6–8 tables. Every card also has a plain-language definition and a Discuss question.

Color	Big idea	What the cards cover	Report
Green	Humans and AI	How humans and AI differ, who builds AI, and when to use it	Table 2
Blue	Representation & Reasoning	How AI encodes the world and reasons about it	Table 3
Black	Machine Learning	Sensors, data, training, and models	Table 4
White	Ethical AI Design	Fairness, bias, model cards, and accountability	Table 5
Red	Societal Impacts of AI	Effects on people, society, and the environment	Table 6

A few cards about kinds of AI companies and computer hardware (like Fast-Moving Lab, GPU, and CPU) are grounded in general accuracy rather than the report. The full card-by-card mapping is in the card list's teacher appendix.

Look up your card

Every card has a number in its bottom-right corner, like 24/70. On the Look up your card page, students type that number or the card's name to open a short page about the AI idea on it:

In real life: an everyday example.
Try it: a 2-minute activity, no screen needed.
Talk about it: the card's Discuss question.
In the game: what the card does, in plain words.

Optional, for students who want to learn more after class. The pages are phone-friendly, need no account, and aren't listed in search engines, so share the address with your students: tokenstcg.com/look-up.

Open Look up your card

Vocabulary

The Terms and Definitions guide explains every game word (Training Set, Audit, Flag, Deprecated…) and every AI term on the cards, in plain language students can use.

Open the Terms and Definitions guide