A card game from Manila pairs organic chemistry with Filipino plant lore

On a dim stage in Manila on 17 July 2026, a deck of illustrated playing cards did something chemistry textbooks rarely manage: it taught the regiochemistry of the Markovnikov addition by way of a roadside weed used to treat dengue fever. The game is called Herbularyo, a portmanteau of the Filipino herboraryo, the plant-knowledge tradition of the village healer, and a not-quite-English suffix borrowed from playing-card hobbyists. The deck is small, the audience is small, and the cultural territory it claims is unusually specific.

The premise is straightforward on paper. One half of each card profiles a plant used in Philippine traditional medicine, drawn from the materia medica of the herbularyo figure. The other half carries an organic-chemistry task: name the product, draw the mechanism, identify the functional group, predict the regio- or stereochemical outcome. The linker is a small number on each card that tells players which two domains are meant to meet. A student who can hold Euphorbia hirta, known locally as tawa-tawa, in the same mental frame as a free-radical halogenation is the sort of student the designers say they want to produce.

What the cards carry

Tawa-tawa, the low-growing herb that prospers in open grasslands across the archipelago, is the deck's marquee card. Its reputation as a supplementary treatment for dengue has circulated in Philippine folk medicine for at least a generation, even as clinicians have repeatedly noted that the supporting evidence is thin. The Herbularyo team uses the plant less as a clinical endorsement than as a teaching peg: it lets the deck anchor a chemistry lesson in something the player has actually seen growing through a cracked pavement. Other plants on the early roster, according to the project's public materials, include lagundi, yerba buena, and sampaguita, the national flower and a terpenoid source that fits comfortably into a chapter on natural products.

The chemistry side of the deck is built on a classic second-year organic sequence. Reactions covered include Markovnikov and anti-Markovnikov hydrohalogenation, E1 and E2 eliminations, the Diels–Alder cycloaddition, and the standard menu of carbonyl chemistry. Difficulty, the developers say, is graded card by card rather than deck by deck, so a high-school student and a fourth-year chemistry major can be dealt different hands from the same box.

A small market, deliberately

The Filipino tabletop-game scene is microscopic by global standards, and Philippine chemistry publishing is in similar shape. The Herbularyo team has framed this as a feature. Their target is not the international hobby-store shelf but the local high-school classroom and the balikbayan care package, the gift-laden shipment that overseas Filipino workers send home. A deck of herbal flashcards travels well, weighs little, and sidesteps the licensing and shipping costs of a real textbook.

The economics are correspondingly modest. The first run was self-funded, in the range that small Kickstarter-style projects in the archipelago typically clear, and the team has signalled an interest in partnering with Philippine science high schools rather than chasing retail distribution. None of the figures in the project's public communications approach the scale of, say, a Magic: The Gathering expansion or a regional Monopoly edition. This is not where the money is. It is where the attention is.

The counterweight

There is an honest critique built into the project, and it comes from inside the country that the game honours. Filipino folk healers have spent decades watching their materia medica extracted, catalogued, and published in English-language journals without citation, and the team behind Herbularyo is candid about the line they are trying to walk. Putting the herbularyo tradition on a card next to a Markovnikov addition is, they acknowledge, an act of framing. The wild plant, the named healer, and the reagents in the round-bottom flask are not the same kind of knowledge, and the card that links them has to respect both.

The strongest version of this caution, voiced by Filipino ethnobotanists in comments carried alongside the launch, is that the game risks reducing a living practice to a set of flashcards. A disease like dengue is treated with decoctions, fasting, and the careful judgement of a person who knows the patient's history. None of that fits on a 63-by-88 millimetre rectangle, and the deck should not pretend otherwise. The chemistry side carries its own risk: students who memorise outcomes rather than mechanisms will eventually run into a reaction the deck does not cover, and they will be no better prepared than a student who memorised a herbal.

What the project signals

Science communication in Southeast Asia has, for most of the last decade, been an importer's market: translations of Anglophone textbooks, lecture videos on YouTube, and a small, serious community of chemistry educators adapting the material to local exam systems. Herbularyo sits in the less populated corner where a country builds outward from its own plant lore. The move is modest, the audience is narrow, and the sources for clinical efficacy remain contested, as clinical efficacy for the named herbs generally does.

The deck is best read as a proof of concept. It asks whether a Filipino student who already knows what tawa-tawa looks like can be persuaded that a Hofmann elimination is something that belongs to them, and not just to the page in a textbook imported from Singapore. If the answer in a year is a credible yes, the project will have done the small, useful thing it set out to do. If the answer is no, it will at least have left the country a usable map of where the cultural bridge broke.

This piece reported only the descriptive material released with the Herbularyo launch; clinical claims for the plants named on the cards have not been independently verified here and remain the subject of ongoing research outside this article.