The first print run (5000) was beautifully printed by Carta Mundi, in Turnhout. Two hundred uncut sheets—showing the entire card game on the recto and all the photos on the verso in one view—are being sold, numbered and signed. They’re selling like hotcakes. Collectors find them original and aesthetic. Van den Berghe is well aware that with this, he immediately steps into the commercial-artistic circuit, which he hates and resists. “But I had to find a manageable form to communicate more fluidly. Until now, I mostly made things, did things that were unsellable or unique. Which therefore reached very few people. But what is more practical than a deck of cards, more playful? And so I’ve now concentrated a number of ideas and feelings into it that I want to share, which previously I could only express individually.”

With his earlier, more plastic actions involving mock bombs (bent back into boomerangs returning to the sender), Van den Berghe already drew attention in a playful and critical way to the horror of using real bombs. By channeling his bomb obsession into a card game (this symbol of all competition, as he says), new meanings emerge. While playing, one tries to win, to make the others lose. To that end, one hides as much information as possible from the opponents, while passing on all possible information to one's partners. Information means power. Power means aggression. The element of aggression is built into every (card) game. Even without the addition of bombs or boomerangs. Those merely underscore a reality.

In ever-changing forms, with inexhaustible inventiveness, Van den Berghe gives voice to his protest against violence, hysteria, manipulation. Just as he remains, despite everything, the marginal freak in his private life, refusing to fit into any system, he manages to express himself in a personal code that escapes conventional artistic clichés. Of course, he doesn’t supply a key to that personal code. One must find it oneself, in doing, in interpreting the work itself. As with any other artist, he calls on a creative approach. The originality of his method and the unexpected nature of his imagery don’t always make this easy, but they precisely reflect his personal world of thought, infused with a kindly malicious reflection on societal and political situations.

Whether, in the meantime, this card game is suitable for normal use, for an actual game? Probably not, since the backs of the cards quickly become recognizable due to the different photographs. But that doesn’t matter to Van den Berghe. The card game is released in duplicate: two complete decks in a plastic box. With the intention of challenging the public to do something else with it, to add something, or to use it creatively in one way or another. Two weekly magazines have considered sending the card game to their most loyal subscribers as a bonus, and then—using the 52 best responses—perhaps compile a third card game. Meanwhile, Roland and his friends in Las Palmas are making a video report on the presence of their bomb card game at the bridge tournament: the result will then be a new work.”

Translated from the Dutch text: 1974, Bridge en Bommen: Het Kaartspel van Roland Van den Berghe by Callewaert, Marc. Gazet van Antwerpen, 08 May 1974, p.7.