Deadlands Doomtown as used in this category includes not just the collectible card game, but also the phalanx of collaborators involved its creation and play. Beyond this, it also means the great complex of social, political, economic, and psychological forces that influence all these people in uncountable ways.

Doomtown -- poker played with freshly printed illustrated cards -- dramatizes ideas, sets them in confrontation with each other, and tests them in action. The paradoxes of Doomtown play resonate for us as they could not have even for the populace of the Wild West depicted on the cards, for the progression of fate through the millennium compels us to embrace Doomtown's treatment of our paramount concerns: self-knowledge and self-definition, the nature and value of happiness, the power of ideology, the intrications of spirit, and the obduracy of flesh. Each character taunts the gambler, "I mayb be even be more 'alive' than you are."