Cards Against Humanity

Development

Cards Against Humanity was created by a group of Highland Park High School alumni as a party game for a New Year's Eve celebration. Heavily influenced by the popular Apples to Apples card game, it was initially named Cardenfreude and involved a group of players writing out the most abstract and, often, humorous response to the topic question. The name was later changed to Cards Against Humanity, with the answers pre-written on the white cards known today. Co-creator Ben Hantoot cited experiences with various games such as Magic: The Gathering, Balderdash, and Charades as inspiration, also noting that Mad Libs was "the most direct influence" for the game

The game was financed with a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign and influenced by a previous crowd-funded campaign for a book on the design of the Obama campaign. The campaign started on December 1, 2010; it met its goal of $4,000 in two weeks. The campaign ended on January 30, 2011 and raised over $15,000; just under 400% of its original goal. With this additional money raised towards the game, the creators added fifty more cards to the game itself.

Gameplay

To start the game, each player draws ten white cards.

The person who most recently pooped (a form of primitive randomization) begins as the Card Czar (or Tsar) and plays a black card, face up. The Card Czar reads the question or fill-in-the-blanks phrase on the black card out loud.

The other players answer the question or fill in the blanks by each passing one white card (or however many required by the black card), face down, to the Card Czar.

The Card Czar shuffles all of the answers and shares each card combination with the group. For full effect, the Card Czar should usually re-read the black card before presenting each answer. The Card Czar then picks the funniest play, and whoever submitted it gets one "Awesome Point".

After the round, a new player becomes the Card Czar, and everyone draws back up to 10 white cards.

The part of speech of a white card is a noun or gerund, including both single words and phrase constructions. Black cards are either fill-in-the-blank statements or questions. Both white and black cards break these rules on rare occasions.

The rules do not state how to win the game—the object being simply to have fun.

The rules in Cards Against Humanity are flexible and can be altered with the many house rules (which are listed in the rules) that players can incorporate (e.g. winning cards are chosen democratically, ability to trade points for cards, points given by ranks, etc.). The official rules include additional provisions for gambling previously won "Awesome Points" for the right to play additional white cards during a round.

Release and sales

After six months of development, Cards Against Humanity officially released in May 2011. A month later, it became the number one game on Amazon.com. Since its release, CAH has gradually become more popular and has seen a rise of sales throughout the years. The Chicago Sun-Times estimated that CAH earned at least $12 million in profit, and according to the company customers have downloaded the PDF file 1.5 million times in the year since they began tracking the numbers. Despite co-creator Max Temkin stating in a 2014 interview that he did not want retail shoppers to 'cheapen our brand', the game and expansion packs are currently being sold in select Target retail locations, as of January 2017.

In October 2011, the game was exhibited as part of the "Big Games" area of the annual IndieCade games festival in Culver City, where the release of a first expansion was officially announced. In November 2011, the expansion was released. It sold out in three days. The first expansion contained 100 new cards and 12 blank cards.

Black Friday promotions

Since 2013, the creators of Cards Against Humanity have held satirical promotions on Black Friday. In 2013, an "anti-sale" was held in which the game's cost was raised by $5 USD. Despite its higher price, the game went on to maintain its best-selling status on Amazon and experienced a minor spike in sales during that period.

In 2014, to "help you experience the ultimate savings on Cards Against Humanity", the game and its expansions were removed from the online store and replaced by "Bullshit"—boxes containing sterilized bull feces, sold at $6 USD each. Over 30,000 boxes were sold.

In 2015, the game's online store was replaced by an order form with an offer to "Give Cards Against Humanity $5" and receive nothing in return. The offer was justified by claiming that "the greatest Black Friday gift of all is buying nothing. We're offering that for the rock-bottom price of $5. How can you afford NOT to seize this incredible opportunity?", and that what the money would be used for would be announced "soon" 11,248 customers spent $71,145 on the offer during the campaign. The money was ultimately divided equally among the Cards Against Humanity team members, who were asked to report back what they spent their money on. Many of them made donations to different charities.

For 2016, the creators began to live stream the excavation of a "Holiday Hole", located in Oregon, Illinois and stated that they would continue to dig the hole as long as they continue to receive donations. The creators have not stated any reason for the hole nor any planned use of the money, and explicitly ruled out charity in a FAQ by asking the reader, "why aren't YOU giving all this money to charity? It's your money." $100,573 was collected. Later in the week, the hole was filled back up and reseeded.

Expansions and additional products

Cards Against Humanity comes as a base set, with six separate commercially available expansions, nine themed packs, and one additional accessory. There are also 3 international editions and 20 limited availability releases.

In addition, with the help of the Cards Against Humanity team, the 2014 MIT Mystery Hunt held a Cards Against Wonderland event with MIT and Wonderland themed decks of 416 cards (346 white, 70 black). Some of the cards consisted of the Presidential family of 129 B.C committing incest (for the winsest) with aliens. A limited number of decks were printed for the event, but PDF versions of the cards were provided to all teams after the event ended.

Philanthropy

In December 2012, Cards Against Humanity released a special holiday expansion pack. Proceeds were donated to the Wikimedia Foundation. Individuals chose how much to pay for the pack. The average amount paid was $3.89 (with the majority of contributors paying $5) which resulted in an overall profit of $70,066.27.

In December 2013, the creators released a "12 Days of Holiday Bullshit" holiday promotion. Individuals paid $12 to receive 12 random presents for 12 days. On the tenth day, Cards Against Humanity donated $1 for every person who contributed to this deal, amassing $100,249.94 that was donated to several educational projects via DonorsChoose.

Cards Against Humanity announced a science-themed expansion pack in 2015, which promised to donate the profits to scholarships for women going into STEM. The pack has raised over $500k for the scholarship.

On July 28, 2015, Cards Against Humanity announced a design-themed expansion pack, featuring 30 cards that were created by famous designers riffing on the late comedian George Carlin’s legendary “seven dirty words.” All proceeds were donated to the Chicago Design Museum.

On November 19, 2015, Cards Against Humanity announced a fantasy-themed expansion pack, written by various fantasy authors including Patrick Rothfuss. For the first two weeks of the sale of this pack all of the proceeds were promised to be donated to Worldbuilders, in support of Heifer International. Worldbuilders is a charity organization started by Pat Rothfuss.

In December 2015, Cards Against Humanity launched their holiday gift campaign with "Eight Sensible Gifts for Hanukkah" in which humorous gifts were sent out over the course of the Hanukkah holiday. The first three gifts were pairs of socks, with later gifts including a year-long membership to Chicago Public Radio station WBEZ, as well as a week of paid vacation for their Chinese-based manufacturing plant staff.

Reception

The game was praised as "Simple, yet well-executed" by the Chicago Tribune "Puzzler", "pretty amazing" by The A.V. Club, and "the game your party deserves" by Thrillist. However, in December 2015, the game received a rating of 6.48/10 in reviews on BoardGameGeek. The score earned it a ranking of 146 in party games.

Reviews note the similarity between Cards Against Humanity and the 1999 family card game Apples to Apples. The A.V. Club interview calls the game "a sort of Apples To Apples for the crass and jaded." Criticism for the game stems from its enjoyment primarily depending on the number of players participating as well as many reviewers' concern that its politically incorrect content may offend certain audiences.

Criticism

In a letter of complaint to The New York Times Magazine, writer Dan Brooks argued that "Like America’s most successful brands, Cards Against Humanity positions itself against the masses, when in fact it is mass taste distilled. It is the product of a culture in which transgressing social norms has become an agreed-on social norm." He continued, saying "That may be because Cards Against Humanity isn’t really transgressive at all. It is a game of naughty giggling for people who think the phrase 'black people' is inherently funny." He concluded by saying "The awful thing is that it works. The reliability of Cards Against Humanity as an activity most people will enjoy only makes it more depressing to those of us immune to its charms. It is, in the end, a party game for horrible people. But who else is there to party with?" Brooks' editorial received attention from media sources such as The A.V. Club and PJ Media.

In mid 2014, a popular Tumblr post wherein the poster burns a Cards Against Humanity card featuring a transphobic joke spurred an apology from Max Temkin. "I regret writing this card, it was a mean, cheap joke. We took it out of the game a while ago", Temkin replied on his own Tumblr. Cards Against Humanity occasionally releases new versions of the game where certain cards are removed or added in order to stay up to date.