Cards Against Humanity
For my critical play assignment, I chose the game of Cards Against Humanity. Cards Against Humanity is a party game meant for adults in which players must complete fill-in-the-blank statements by using the cards they have drawn, which tend to contain words or statements considered offensive. The game was financed by a Kickstarter campaign in 2011, developed and published by Cards Against Humanity LLC, and while the main commercial version of the game is analog, there exists an online version on the website Pretend You’re Xyzzy. The game describes itself as “a party game for horrible people”; thus, it’s fully oriented toward an adult audience. The game supports anywhere from 3 to even more than 20 players depending on the size of the deck, which starts with 550 cards and can grow to be quite large when considering all of its expansions. At the beginning of the game, all players draw ten white cards from the box, and after the player elected card Czar draws a black card from the box and reads its fill in the blank statement to the group; each player must complete it by passing a card or two depending on the number of blanks in the card, face down. Then the card Czar shuffles the answers, and after reading all the combinations, they pick the funniest resulting statement, and the person who answered it gets the point. A new player is elected card Czar, and the process is repeated until the players decide on an endpoint or, in extreme cases, one of the decks is exhausted.
While being very social and generating fellowship through laughter, jokes, and commentaries, the game can also become very competitive as people believe their answers were genuinely funnier than the chosen one. This can be accentuated when a significant huge point imbalance as the game moves on. Also, while it is not attempting to extend itself into the storytelling territory, some of the resulting statements result in genuinely interesting premises or short stories which some players enjoy developing or playing for a short amount of time.
The game works by setting up situations that could lead to hilarious yet offensive and politically incorrect jokes or stories and taking the pressure of the blame off by giving players pre-made answers instead of forcing them to ideate the answers or come up with the situations themselves. The game is also not for the faint of heart, I’ve seen people not enjoy it because they consider it mean or too inappropriate, so it must be played with a crowd who is comfortable with that sort of humor. In my opinion, however, some aspects of the game could be tweaked to make it a more relaxed experience. Instead of just having a Czar card, we could have one turn where the funniest card is selected by a group vote which could please some players who might want more agency as they wait to become card Czar. I also think it would be funny to have “tag-along” stories that could build off the jokes made in the previous rounds in a sort of interactive story setting and see the stories the players come up with.
Cards Against Humanity pretty much redefined the genre of fill-in-the-blank games with its shamelessly offensive jokes and by targeting an adult audience. With all of its expansions, because of the sheer amount of content that is kept up to date with political, societal, and cultural references and immediately recognizable name and formula, I believe it is still the most popular and funniest game out of the myriad of adult fill-in-the-blank games that have come out since.
Also, you don’t need to get very vulnerable as the answers and situations are not of your own making, so it takes the pressure off. Even if you’re not an edge lord of politically incorrect humor you can enjoy it and not be judged by your fellow players because they must share the same level of vulnerability.
