Arnold Palmer’s Golf Card Game: The King, the URL, and the Coincidence That Still Haunts Me
I need to tell you a story. It involves Arnold Palmer, an infomercial, a VHS tape, a URL, and the kind of coincidence that makes you wonder if the universe is paying attention.
In 2013, I was sitting on a pool deck in Buffalo, New York, tinkering with a card game I’d been developing. I called it Golf the Card Game. Around the same time, I was converting old VHS tapes to digital files — a separate project, totally unrelated. And while scanning through one of those tapes, I stumbled on a late-night infomercial I’d recorded years earlier.
It was for Arnold Palmer’s Golf Card Game. Arnold Palmer — the King himself — sitting in what looked like a living room, endorsing a card game. “Fast & Exciting!” the screen read. “Up to 6 Players.” And there, at the bottom of the screen, in bold green type:
www.GolfTheCardGame.com
The same URL I had registered for my own game.
The Company Behind the King
Arnold Palmer’s Golf Card Game was published in 2005 by a company called — and I am not making this up — Golf The Card Game, Inc. A Missouri-based company formed in January 1999, run by a man named Shane Dugger, operating as the official licensee to Arnold Palmer Enterprises, Inc.
The company’s mission statement: “to offer a simple, fun, yet challenging Card Game of golf for all to enjoy… for those times off the course.” That tagline — “for those times off the course” — appears throughout the rule book, signed by Arnold Palmer himself.
The website was GolfTheCardGame.com. The company was Golf The Card Game, Inc. The product was Arnold Palmer’s Golf Card Game. And years later, without knowing any of this history, I independently named my own game Golf the Card Game and registered the same URL.
I eventually lost that URL. But the coincidences didn’t stop there. When it came time to formally register my company, I chose Missouri — because my mother’s side of the family has had a farm outside Grant City, Missouri for generations. On April 17, 2025, the State of Missouri issued a Certificate of Organization for Golf The Card Game LLC. Same name as the Arnold Palmer company. Same state as the Arnold Palmer company. Filed 26 years apart. I didn’t know Golf The Card Game, Inc. had been a Missouri company when I chose to register there. I chose Missouri because of a family farm. The universe doesn’t just have a sense of humor. It has a whole comedy set.
The Game
Arnold Palmer’s Golf Card Game comes with 110 cards, a full-color rule book with Palmer’s photo and signature on multiple pages, and scorecards. It’s a beautifully produced product — the Palmer umbrella logo on the card backs, professional layout, and the unmistakable weight of a licensed endorsement from the most beloved golfer who ever lived.
The mechanics use a grid layout where the number of cards dealt depends on the par of the hole — Par 3s get 6 cards, Par 4s get 8 cards, Par 5s get 10 cards (par times two). Cards are dealt face down in two rows — the “Address” position. No peeking.
To begin each hole, you “Tee Off” by flipping one of your face-down cards. If it’s a Stroke card (values 0-7) or a Bonus card (Eagle at -2 or Birdie at -1), that’s a successful tee off and you can draw and swap. If it’s a Penalty card — In the Water, Out of Bounds, or In the Woods — the card goes to the side and stays with you for the entire hole. Penalty cards cannot be discarded. They stick.
The target score for every hole is zero. Scoring is based on the difference between columns of cards — Stroke cards add, Bonus cards subtract, Penalty cards always add one stroke each. The math creates a goal that’s simple to understand but hard to achieve: get everything to cancel out to zero.
When one player flips all their cards face up, everyone else gets a “Final Putt” — one last turn. Any remaining face-down cards are flipped without exchange, unless a penalty card is revealed, in which case it goes to the side and is replaced from the draw pile. Lowest total wins the hole.
There’s even a “For Better Play” variant printed on the instruction card that recommends removing the 4 “In the Woods” penalties, 4 “In the Water” penalties, and 2 Eagle cards for a cleaner, faster game.
Arnold Palmer and Card Games
Arnold Palmer didn’t just lend his name to this game — he lived it. The man who made golf accessible to the masses, who turned a country club sport into America’s pastime, who built an empire that included course design, beverages, apparel, and aviation — of course he’d put his name on a card game. The whole idea of Palmer was bringing golf to everyone, everywhere, by any means necessary.
The back page of the rule book carries a quote attributed to Palmer: “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what the game has done for me. I look at the people I’ve met and the associations I’ve made through golf. If I had more, I’d give more. Everything I have I owe to golf.”
Palmer passed away on September 25, 2016, at age 87. He won 62 PGA Tour events, including 7 major championships, He was the first player to earn $1 million in career prize money, He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And for a few years in the mid-2000s, his face was on a golf card game sold through late-night infomercials and at Target.
The Infomercial on the VHS Tape
I can’t prove the universe was trying to tell me something when that infomercial played on my screen in 2013, I was already working on my own golf card game, I had the same URL. And there was Arnold Palmer, on a VHS tape I’d recorded years earlier, promoting a game with the same name as mine, from a company with the same name as mine, at a URL that was the same as mine.
I didn’t copy Arnold Palmer’s game. I didn’t even know it existed when I started designing GTCG. In fact, 2013 was the year I tried to launch Golf the Card Game on Kickstarter. I set a modest goal of $2,500. I failed. Too many game snobs found it “too simple.” Kids were just starting to get phones in their hands, and card games weren’t getting traction on social media — at least not with the people I was reaching.
The campaign died quietly. But I didn’t. I kept tinkering. For twelve more years. Until August 2025, when GTCG finally hit Amazon. The mechanics are different — Golf the Card Game is a 4-card game with the Fore! Card, Wild Cards, and the Mulligan mechanic, built for speed and family play. Palmer’s game uses a variable grid based on par, with a zero-target scoring system and sticky penalty cards. They’re different games that happened to share a name and a URL.
But I’d be lying if I said that moment — sitting there in 2013, watching Arnold Palmer promote “Golf The Card Game” on a TV I’d recorded years before — didn’t feel like something. A signal. A nod from the golf gods. A reminder that the idea of putting golf in a deck of cards is as old as the game itself, and that I wasn’t the first to try, and I wouldn’t be the last.
Finding One Today
Arnold Palmer’s Golf Card Game is available on Amazon and surfaces regularly on eBay. Complete copies with the rule book and scorecards are out there. It was sold at Target during its run. The Palmer name and umbrella logo make it instantly recognizable. If you’re a Palmer collector or a golf card game collector, it’s a must-have.
Everything I Have I Owe to Golf
Arnold Palmer said it. I feel it. Every creator in this series — from Jesse Hyatt in Virginia to Jason Stiff in Montana to Christian Petersen in Minnesota to the kids in New Jersey — feels it. The love of golf is what puts a card game in a box and sends it out into the world.
Palmer’s version is the only one in this series endorsed by a legend. It’s the only one that had an infomercial. It’s the only one that was sold at Target. And it’s the only one that shares a name and a URL with a game that was being invented on a pool deck in Buffalo at the exact moment its infomercial played on a VHS tape being converted to digital.
Some stories you can’t make up. You just have to live them.
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This post is part of our ongoing series exploring golf card games throughout history. From P.O. Boxes to the King of Golf himself, the love of golf at the table belongs to everyone.