Critical Play: Cards Against Humanity
Cards Against Humanity, designed by Josh Dillon, Daniel Dranove, Eli Halpern, Ben Hantoot, David Munk, David Pinsof, Max Temkin, Eliot Weinstein, was originally funded by a Kickstarter campaign and has now become a genre-defining party judging game published by Cards Against Humanity LLC. As it includes content that can be extremely offensive and politically incorrect, its target audience is comprised of people who are mature enough to understand its sexual, political, and sometimes racial and religious themes. However, from personal experience, its actual audience ends up being middle schoolers who are just discovering these themes and are eager to try their hand at coming up with the most foul, outrageous answers to make their friends laugh.
The game is played as follows: there are 4+ players (but ideally between 6 and 8, as more people is always more fun but long rounds and distracting side conversations can make people bored) who each compete to submit as hilarious of a response card as possible to a given prompt card. These are the only two types of cards, giving the game an easily comprehensible minimalist design that divides cards into black prompts and white responses. Example prompt cards are “I drink to forget ____” and “TSA guidelines now prohibit _____ on airplanes,” whereas example responses are “Powerful thighs” and “Joe Biden.” The game also has many expansions for people who are passionate about various things like politics, sex, or alcohol. Each round, one player is the judge, who takes all the response cards, submitted anonymously, and selects one as the best (usually the funniest), awarding the player who submitted it the round’s prompt card. The game is won when a player obtains a certain number of won prompt cards, the number of which scaling with the group size. One interesting dynamic of the game that emerges because of its social nature is that players submitting responses can (and usually try to) use what they know about the judge from their real-life relationship to select the card that they specifically would think to be the funniest.
The dominant form of fun in the game is Fellowship. The whole point of the game is to bring people together to socialize and laugh, with the actual gameplay mechanics being secondary. Oftentimes, the most fun parts of playing are talking about, laughing about, and ribbing others for responses submitted to a prompt. The game merely serves as the catalyst for these interactions. Oftentimes, no one even cares who wins, since they’ve had so much fun laughing in the process and have likely gotten a little closer to their fellow players. The game also features elements of Discovery, as players anticipate what everyone put in response to a prompt, and Expression, as players choose what they think is the best choice, telling all the other players what they think would be a funny choice.
This game works because it is funny. It is a funny concept with funny prompts and funny responses. At the end of the day, the most “fun” thing to do in life is to genuinely laugh, and this game is masterful in its production of laughs. As such, this is an extremely successful game, as every time I’ve played it everyone walks away having had a fantastic time. It is much more successful than its predecessor, Apples to Apples, since its prompt-response format, compared to Apples to Apples’s noun-adjective format, offers much more flexibility. It’s also much more heinous than Apples to Apples, the latter of whose family-friendly nature limits players’ ability to be funny, expressive, and creative.
