Rutgers student Emily Chan creates card game 'Stop Requested'

The Rutgers-themed card game of your dreams is finally here! Stop Requested is a Cards Against Humanity-esque game with question and answer cards that are specifically geared toward Rutgers students. 

Emily Chan, a School of Arts and Sciences senior majoring in human resources with a minor in entrepreneurship, along with her business partner Tim Lee, a Rutgers alumni, created this fun party game. I sat down with Chan in the student center on the College Avenue campus to learn more about Stop Requested. As she sat down with her box of 200 cards, I was instantly impressed. The cards were so well-designed with their cute geese logo that I instantly wanted to take a photo of them. 

Lee is currently attending the University of Pennsylvania as a graduate student and was inspired by their own themed cards game, Squirrels Without Morality. “It was doing very well on their campus and he thought: Why wouldn’t Rutgers students like it too?” Chan said.

The whole process took a year, from creating the cards and finding a good company to print them to designing the box and getting a box supplier. Lee handles the logistics and financing of the business, while Chan’s job is marketing and spreading the word around campus about their exciting new game. 

Coming up with ideas was a joint effort, though: “The cards were an ongoing thing, we would bounce ideas off each other, we will always come up with new ideas to incorporate,” Chan said.

While the game is launching in just two weeks, the creating process is never done. Because of the nature of memes, Chan and Lee couldn’t include more recent ones like the lobster on the College Ave campus. We’ll just have to wait for an expansion pack that, as Chan assured me, will be a lot more wild and coming very soon. 

Of course, the infamous Rutgers busses could not be left behind. The name behind the game is an obvious reference to this, but I wanted to know if there was anything else behind it. “We went through lots of different names, throwing things at each other that were Rutgers related,” Chan said. “‘Stop Requested’ sounded catchy.” 

Now, as a clueless transfer student who spends all of her time on the College Ave campus and on Douglass campus, I just had to ask about the geese. The game’s full name is “Stop Requested: A Game for Angry Drunk Geese,” after all. “We were both personally traumatized by the geese on Busch (campus),” Chan said. “What kind of geese are these? They’re Rutgers geese, that’s what they are.”

As Chan began to take out the cards from the box and spread them on the table, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at some of the answer cards. They were hilarious! I can definitely imagine having a good time with them at a small party or with roommates. 

Among my favorites were: “Trying to plan your life on Degree Navigator before the depression kicks back in,” “Easton Avenue as a dating strategy,” “An equally confused undergraduate somehow getting paid to tutor you,” “A long line of every (Rutgers) bus except the one you actually need” and “Flirting on Sakai/Canvas discussion boards.” 

But I just had to know Chan's own favorites. These were her top six: “Arriving in 1, 1, 36 minutes,” “Depression,” “F*ck Penn(sylvania) State (University),” “Another d*mn parking ticket,” “F*ckboys with names that start with the letter J” and “Paying to access your own homework.” 

As our conversation came to a close, I asked Chan the most famous advice question out there: What would you say to other students who want to start their own business? 

“When it comes down to it, you’re just going to put your mind to it and get started. No one else is gonna get started for you. If it’s something you’re passionate about, you’ll definitely reap the rewards from that,” she said. “It’s really fulfilling to do something that you care about. In this case, making Rutgers students happy in this depressing place.”