Golph Card Game: The Weatherman Who’s Still in the Game
Every other game in this series is a relic. A museum piece. A box pulled from an attic or an eBay listing, made by a company that no longer exists and a creator who left no trace.
Not this one.
Golph Card Game — created by Jason Stiff in 2010 — is alive. The website is up. The Facebook page is active. You can order a deck today for five dollars. Jason is still out there, still grinding, still selling his game direct to anyone who wants one.
This is the first living, breathing golf card game in our vintage series — and it deserves the spotlight.
The Creator
Jason Stiff is a certified meteorologist — an AMS CBM Seal-Certified weather professional. His day job is forecasting the weather. His side hustle, for going on 15 years now, is a golf card game he designed after playing the traditional card game “Golf” with a standard deck and thinking: I can make this better.
So he did. He designed his own deck, wrote his own rules, built a website, set up a PayPal button, and started selling Golph for $5 a deck plus $5 shipping via USPS Priority Mail. No Amazon listing, No distributor, No venture capital. Just a weatherman, a card game, and a direct line to his customers.
That’s a story every solo creator understands.
How It Plays
Golph uses a 9-card grid — three rows of three, dealt face down. You flip one card to start, then draw and swap to lower your total score over the course of the hand. Cards range from -3 (Double Eagle) to 9, with golf terms baked into every value: -1 is a Birdie, 0 is Par, 1 is a Bogey, and so on up the scoring ladder.
Here’s the mechanic that sets Golph apart: matching three identical cards in a row — horizontal, vertical, or diagonal — zeroes out all three. It’s essentially tic-tac-toe logic layered into a golf card game. Suddenly you’re not just chasing low cards — you’re building patterns. A trio of 9s is better than three random low cards, because that row of 9s scores zero. The math changes everything.
The deck also includes Wild Cards (Mulligans) that can become any card, Reverse Order cards (Duck Hooks) that flip the direction of play, and Lose A Turn cards (Lost Balls) that knock an opponent out for a round. The golf terminology isn’t just flavor text — it’s the scoring system.
A hand ends when one player has all 9 cards face up. That’s one hole. Play 9 or 18 for a full round. Lowest total wins.
The $5 Game
Golph retails for $5. Five dollars. That’s less than a sleeve of golf balls. Less than a drink at the clubhouse. Less than parking at most courses. Jason’s pitch on the website is simple and honest: “You will get hundreds and hundreds of hours of fun for only $5.00.”
He sells direct through his website via PayPal or personal check. Ships same day or next business day via Priority Mail. No middleman, no marketplace fees, no algorithm to fight. It’s the most direct creator-to-customer relationship in this entire series — and one of the most direct in the card game world, period.
Why This One Matters
I’ve spent months writing about golf card games made by companies that vanished. Warren Paper Products — gone. Western Publishing — gone. Jesse Hyatt — passed in 1991. KWG in Grafton — untraceable. Ultimate Golf Inc. — a ghost. Top Golf Playing Card Co. — invisible. Adrace Industries in Australia — disappeared.
Jason Stiff is still here. Still answering emails, Still shipping decks, Still posting on Facebook. He’s been doing this since 2010 — 15 years of keeping a self-published card game alive without a major retailer, without ads, without any of the infrastructure that most game companies rely on.
That’s not just persistence. That’s belief.
I know what that feels like. I invented Golf the Card Game in 2013 and didn’t get it to Amazon until 2025. The mechanics are completely different — GTCG is a 4-card draw-and-swap game with the Fore! Card, Wild Cards, and the Mulligan — but the journey is the same. You make something, You believe in it, You keep going.
Jason and I aren’t competitors. We’re fellow travelers. The golf card game world is big enough for both of us — and for every other creator who’s ever put a golf game in a box and put it out there.
Go Support a Fellow Creator
If you love golf card games — and if you’re reading this series, you do — go check out Golph. Visit golphcards.com, follow Golph Cards on Facebook, and grab a deck for five bucks. Tell Jason that the guy from Buffalo sent you.
Supporting independent game creators isn’t charity. It’s how the tradition stays alive. Every deck Jason sells, every deck I sell, every deck anyone sells proves that people still want to sit down with friends and family and play something real — no screens, no apps, just cards on a table.
Rising tides lift all boats. Or in this case, all foursomes.
Find us at playgtcg.com or on social media.
This post is part of our ongoing series exploring golf card games throughout history — and into the present. The tradition didn’t end with the vintage games. It’s alive, and people like Jason Stiff are proof.