We made a physical card game for TECHIES!

It’s a spin-off of the classic Taboo game and we call it Techie Taboo.

The idea is simple: you have to explain a tech word (for example, Impact) without using the five taboo words on the card. That’s it. Simple, fun, and surprisingly effective, especially when it comes to learning how to actually explain tech concepts to other humans.

This game is truly my brain-child.

I’m Saloni, a Software Developer and co-host of a tech podcast called ragTech. One of the things we deeply care about is making technology more accessible and less intimidating. And honestly? Less buzzword-y.

Like many techies, I’m… awkward. I don’t love small talk. What I do love is talking about tech. So this whole idea started when I was thinking about a team-bonding activity for a women-in-tech event.

My thinking was:
A room full of introverted, slightly awkward people… but everyone has tech in common.
So how do we break the ice?

And then, tuh duh, Techie Taboo was incepted.

The very first version was extremely low-tech. I literally printed words on paper and cut them out. Yes, I did use AI to help generate the words and taboo lists, but not everything made sense. Some were wildly off. So I iterated through them manually to make sure the words were actually usable and logical.

Then my friends (and ragTech co-hosts), Victoria and Natasha, pushed me to turn this into a real game. And that’s when we got serious about designing.

We quickly realised we needed a lot more cards if this game was going to be replayable. That’s when Natasha built a web app that honestly blew my mind. She used JavaScript to dynamically generate SVG markup as strings and injected them directly into HTML DOM elements.

No image generation. No heavy assets. Just clean, lightweight, low-energy image generation using SVGs.
Even the cute little techybaras were added directly into the SVGs 🐹💻.

Once we had the designs ready, we sent the cards to a printing shop in China via Taobao and received our first draft of physical cards. Holding them in our hands for the first time felt unreal.

After that, we started posting reels of us playing Techie Taboo with friends and launched a simple website to see if there was any demand for something like this.

We’re very aware that this is a simple game and can be easily replicated. But what we noticed, both on our podcast and at tech conferences, is that people throw around buzzwords without really understanding them.

Words like:

• Agentic AI

• MCP

So now, we use Techie Taboo on our podcast to get guests to explain tech concepts in plain language. And we bring it to tech events to help people actually break down what these buzzwords mean.

Right now, we’re at 10 supporters 🥹
Once we get our hands on high-quality final prints, we’ll be reaching out to our supporters and selling the cards to them.

We’re incredibly grateful for our early supporters, many of whom are our friends ❤️
This started as a scrappy idea, and seeing people resonate with it has been really special.

If you’d like to be one of them, you can support us at https://ragtechdev.com/techie-taboo — we’d love to have you along for the ride 💫