Red Dead Redemption 2: Collecting 144 Cigarette Cards
My grandmother and my grandfather smoked cigarettes, and I mean a lot of cigarettes. Enough cigarettes in fact that, by the time they met their end my grandfather had had a stroke which resulted in an inability to speak, and my grandmother had had 13 tumors, her left lung, and part of her brain removed resulting in her conviction that Osama Bin Laden was hiding in the bushes outside of her hospice window. I’ll let my reader decide for themselves whether that last one was true or not. The Osama Bin Laden part, not the hallucinations, those were actually real. This brief background of my family’s medical history serves as an important reminder that I really need to find more time in the day to play Red Dead Redemption 2 because there’s at least 100 more cigarette cards to collect.
There’s also a ton of fishing to do.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a gargantuan videogame in terms of the amount of content and details packed into two compact discs. Just in terms of length of the game the website How Long to Beat posits that the main storyline alone is likely to take 50.5 hours, with side-quests pushing that number to 83 hours, and a completionist route ending up at 187 hours in total. And all of those numbers are assuming of course that the player sticks to the path instead of taking time to just go hunting for the fun of it, doing chores at camp to improve morale, robbing banks and strangers along the road, or, again, accounting for how much fishing there is to do.
Seriously I spent an hour just trying to catch the Legendary Salmon up in the mountains, and I lost it three times. Then I almost threw it back and…I’m getting off topic again.
Back to smoking.
I’ll be honest, the first time I played Red Dead Redemption 2 I abandoned the game pretty quickly, mostly because of the introductory snow levels, and then later because of the sheer size of the game itself. When a friend of my ex-wife’s from college came to town to pay us a visit, I casually mentioned playing the game and he immediately provided me with the perfect summation of my perception of it by referring to it as “Yee-Haw Skyrim.”
I want to clarify, I enjoy Red Dead Redemption 2 at this stage of my life far more than Skyrim, but I still call the game Yee-Haw Skyrim lovingly.
Eventually my girlfriend’s passion for playing every part of the game, except for the main storyline, gave me enough impetus to grab my stetson and tackle the giant that is Red Dead Redemption 2, and as of this writing I’ve completed the main storyline once and am working on my second playthrough. This time around I’m dedicating myself to completing side-quests, and one of them is the charmingly titled Smoking and Other Hobbies.
Like most RockStar games, this mission is usually stumbled upon while the character is just wandering around the open world. Arthur Morgan, the protagonist of the game, will meet a well dressed man outside of a train station who’s surrounded with cigarette butts who asks him if he has any cards. The man introduces himself as Phineas T. Ramsbottom, and tells Arthur that he smokes up to 200 cigarettes a day, not because he’s obsessed with smoking (though the inflammation of his red cheeks says otherwise) but because he’s dedicated to collecting the cards within the packs. Ramsbottom shows Arthur a few of the ones he’s collected already, and he informs Arthur that a complete set is incredibly valuable. And, because this is a videogame, he’ll offer Arthur (say that five times fast) a reward for collecting a complete deck.
Apart from the horror of a man smoking 200 cigarettes everyday for the purpose of collecting small pieces of decorated cardboard, this side quest is fascinating to me because, while researching for this essay, I discovered this wasn’t some gag created by Rockstar games. Cigarettes cards actually existed and have a real historical legacy .
For example, Cigarette cards have their own Wikipedia page, and a pretty impressive one too. Digging into the history of these cards their existence was primarily utilitarian, meaning they had an actual purpose. Packs of cigarettes were held in paper, and cigarettes themselves were, and are, paper wrapped around tobacco meaning their structural integrity could be easily undone if the package was jostled around too much. To counter this tobacco companies began producing thick paper cards to include in packs to make sure the cigarettes didn’t get damaged. Around the year 1879, to increase the appeal of their products these companies began including images on the cards which ranged from famous actresses, native american chiefs, famous sports players, flags, and wild animals. Each card series typically had 10 or more cards to collect, with some series having 100 or more.
This general information was fascinating to me in and of itself, and then somewhere along the line I began to dig deeper into the history and archiving of these cards. For example the New York Public Library has a digitized collection of cigarette cards, with their website listing up to 49,721 individual cards. That number was impressive, until I went back to the Wikipedia entry and learned that a man by the name of Edward Wharton-Tigar, a former english spy and mining magnate, made the Guinness Book of World Records when he posthumously donated his collection of Cigarette Cards to the British Museum. His collection amounted to over one million cards.
Pulmonologists have entered the chat, and my lungs briefly had a panic attack after reading that sentence.
Fortunately for players, there are only 144 Cigarette cards in Red Dead Redemption 2 to collect, broken down into 12 series, with 12 cards in each series.
As of this writing, I haven’t collected all of the Cigarette Cards, this is mostly because of the Pinkertons that ambush me everytime I try to ride through Blackwater territory. It’s also because, as of this writing I’ve finished one playthrough of Red Dead Redemption 2’s main storyline and I’m still struck with, “the feelz.”
So many feelz in fact.
Like as many feelz as is possible for someone playing an open world videogame at age 36 in the year of our Lord Neptune 2025.
I mean, this is a Rockstar videogame for pete’s sake, I wasn’t supposed to feelz this much emotion. For crying out loud, I was here for cowboys and bank robberies, not HBO miniseries level narrative depth. Jeezum.
Classifying the side-quest Smoking and Other Hobbies isn’t that difficult; the mission is a Collectathon. Collectathons are, structurally speaking, just a series of items, riddles, or puzzles players need to acquire and/or complete to either finish the main storyline of a game, however they are employed more often as side-quests. I’ve written a few essays already about collectathons, and as I’ve noted in those essays this structure of side-quest typically serves to either flesh out the aesthetic of the videogame, or else afford players reason to explore the virtual world and increase their understanding of in-game controls.
Red Redemption 2 is a massive open-world videogame and cigarette cards are scattered throughout the states of Ambarino, New Hanover, West Elizabeth, New Austin and Lemoyne. And in terms of finding them players can expect huffing it through the snowy mountains, sneaking and/or breaking into private homes, picking cards off of dead bodies, exploring ruins of burnt buildings, or simply finding cards just sitting on a bench by a railway station. The fact that the cards themselves are minute rectangles that can easily disappear into the inextricably detailed environments of the world only make this challenge more daunting, miserable, and, honestly, ludicrously fun for a weapons-grade nerd like me.
Since I’ve started working on this side-quest it’s brought my girlfriend a tremendous amount of joy, mostly because it affords her an opportunity to make fun of me. While playing the game and passing by some run-down or burning cabin I’ll note that I remember it, and when she asks how I remember it the answer is always, “There’s a cigarette card in there.” This usually makes her laugh. At first this interaction was rare since I was predominantly playing for the main storyline, but as I’ve currently hit over 153 hours playing the game, I’m noticing my familiarity with the landscape of this fictionalized United States becoming alarmingly second nature. I’m starting to know which paths and roads will lead me to cards, and passing by a saloon I can recall pretty darn clear whether or not there’s a card I will need in there.
The point is, hunting for these cards has helped me familiarize myself with the world of Red Dead Redemption 2, and what gear I will need in order to find them. It’s also helped me take more time for hunting and tracking, mastering the shooting mechanics, discovering the different plants and herbs I can use for crafting, learning more about the maintenance of Arthurs health (as well as the health of his horse), and also giving me cause to finally start catching all of those Legendy animals and fish.
This mission is a lot of fun, and I’ve really enjoyed it.
But at some point I have to ask myself, isn't it ridiculous to spend so much time looking for what amounts to colorful pieces of paper. And, from a meta-perspective they’re not even paper, they’re pixels on a screen.
This question is a perfect segway to discuss the narrative structure of the Collectathon.
When I wrote about the videogame Cubivore: Survival of the Fittest I observed that that particular videogame used the structure of a Collectathon to tell a story about change. Cubivore is…a strange videogame, but it’s incredibly unique for the fact that it used collecting to observe how change was at the core of becoming stronger and bringing the essence of nature back into the world. By collecting mutations rather than objects PiggyBob (the name I chose for my Cubivore(though to be clear the game assigns him the name Piggy(I wasn’t consulted))) is healing nature as well as building his own agency.
Red Redemption 2’s collectathon is far more sarcastic, and that’s entirely because it’s a videogame published by Rockstar.
Since the first Grand Theft Auto videogame was released for Playstation in 1997 (and Ms-DOS, Windows, and the Nintendo Gameboy Color) there’s been a narrative tone that has perpetuated throughout the series. Grand Theft Auto games lean towards a biting sarcasm about contemporary society. While they are as much a love-letter to the gangster and noir genres, over-time they’ve developed a narrative sense of themselves. Whether it’s the ridiculous parody radio stations, random remarks made by npcs players will bump into on the streets, advertising littered throughout their open world, or just the wanton liberty afforded to players who can do everything from following traffic laws to firing RPGs at public buses, Rockstar is almost always taking a sarcastic jab at society, and to a great extent, the players.
Probably one of the best examples is the side quest Vinewood Souvenirs in Grand Theft Auto 5. The character Trevor is approached by two English tourists who literally offer him money to dig through the trash of celebrities in order to find some object of potential worth. This is just one example because GTA 5 is packed with random encounters of people who are as goofy as they are at times painfully human. I can’t imagine digging through someone else’s trash in the hopes of finding something valuable, but at the same time I know for a fact that such people exist. The side-quest is using this idiosyncrasy to build a world of human beings who are admittedly wacky, ridiculous, absurd, and…well, real. Grand Theft Auto often uses its side quests to poke fun at contemporary society, and while at times these characters are ludicrous to the point of being unbelievable what isn’t shaken is the fact that this is well executed satire.
Put another (and shorter) way: It’s not fantasy, it’s using hyperbole to present truth.
The original Red Dead Redemption didn’t abandon this narrative trick when it was released, but it did alter the structure of its satire. Rather than make fun of the foibles of contemporary human beings, the satire became retrospective; jokes became about the commonplace racism and sexism of past society(as opposed to the commonplace racism and sexism that exists in current society), ignorance of medical realities such as smoking and basic dentistry, the obvious corruption of politicians and government officials, and how idealism was as misguided in the early 1900s as it would be in the later part of the century.
So where do Cigarette Cards fall into all this narrative sarcasm?
If a man smokes 200 cigarettes a day, he’s going to die. I know that because I watched it happen to my grandparents, and players know this because they’re living in the year 2024 and medical science has demonstrated, beyond any doubt, that regular smoking will turn someone’s lungs into a black pit of rot. This is, as of this writing, common knowledge.
A man who was living in the year 1899 wouldn’t have that common knowledge.
And that’s the point.
It’s also where the sarcasm comes into play.
Listening to Phineas T. Ramsbottom boast about his passion for smoking (and then taking a deep, satisfying drag on a cigarette) made me laugh and groan simultaneously because I knew something that he didn’t. I possessed wisdom and intelligence that he did not, and this gave me a bizarre ego boost. There was some kind of pride in knowing that I knew something he didn’t, and there was an arguably sadistic pleasure taken at the knowledge of this man’s eventual medical misfortune. Most of the ridiculous npcs I encounter in Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2 leave me with a similar impression and that sense of superiority is sobering because, as much as I would like to believe that I know more than these people, I’m really just working in a different context.
Characters like Phineas T. Ramsbottom are just people living their life, working with the knowledge and experience they’ve acquired up to that point. Their behavior contextually seems absurd, but that’s because we’re only witnessing them in a few small instances. The player is centered around Arthur and so the foibles expressed by people really only seem odd because the player is projecting themselves through Arthur, who is often portrayed as the most rational person in the room. It’s easy to forget in these moments that Arthur is also the man who boasts to strangers about killing people, who regularly acts as the strong-man for Mr. Straus’s loan sharking, who almost kills a man in a bar brawl he didn’t start, who kills hundreds of animals because (in his own words) he gets so angry, and finally, depending on the player, Arthur is also the man who can murder and/or rob every human and animal in the game he comes across.
Relatively speaking Arthur is just as strange, eccentric, and flawed as Mr. Ramsbottom. The only difference between these men is that I control Arthur and decide if I want to help Mr. Ramsbottom.
Likewise, I can decide whether or not to collect all of the cigarette cards.
I did, and am still working on it.
Thinking about this side quest I wanna share my favorite moment. If my reader will indulge me.
I went hunting for two cards found in a small cabin in the West Elizabeth not too far from Little Creek River. It’s beside a large open meadow, broken by a thin winding river where deer and elk will regularly graze. I approached the building and my horse began to whinney and buck. I figured there were wolves, or possibly even a cougar nearby and prepared for the worst, but nothing appeared. I tried to continue but my horse refused to move. Assuming this was probably just a glitch in the code I dismounted and, this is important, approached the building with only my Cattleman revolver and my hunting knife. On the front porch, on the railing, there was one card. Easy enough. I turned around and opened the door.
I saw the body of the former tenant first.
I saw his blood next which was splattered over the floor.
And then, I saw the grizzly bear, which had been hunched forward over his body, enjoying the easy meal, look up and growl.
In the span of a second the bear was on top of Arthur biting and scratching, meanwhile in the real world my cat (a sweet ginger butt-head named Jones) was running away from the couch annoyed that his owner had woken him up by screaming, yelling, and laughing at this misfortune.
Somehow I killed the bear, wolfed down every can of baked beans I had in my satchel, and then scoured the room for the card, discovering it on the desk. I told my girlfriend the next day that there was a painful humor about almost dying and then immediately observing the animal printed on this card, which hid in the darkness in one of the most potentially lethal secrets of the entire game, because it was a black widow spider.
Arthur’s blood stained fingers tucked the card into his satchel, skinned the bear, and headed back out to his horse. I checked the interactive map I’ve consulted throughout my playthrough of the game and saw that, across the meadow, in a farmhouse that was filled with O'Driscoll gang members, there were four more cigarette cards.
I took a slow deep breath, withdrew my Carbine Repeater I’d taken from a frozen corpse on a mountaintop, and started across the meadow.
Two down, 142 more cards to go.
Somewhere in the world Phineas T. Ramsbottom was smoking his 400th cigarette of the day, Arthur was assuredly bleeding out and looking for more strips of prettied-up cardboard, and I was sitting on my couch marking cards off of my tablet.
Which of us was ultimately the greater fool?
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
9.29.2025
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