For my critical play, I played Cards Against Humanity. It is a card game made by a group of eight High School friends: Josh Dillon, Daniel Dranove, Eli Halpern, Ben Hantoot, David Munk, David Pinsof, Max Temkin, and Eliot Weinstein. The target audience is mostly young adults in the 18-30 age bracket — many prompts have adult themes, but the jokes are often crass in a way that they wouldn’t appeal as much to most older audiences (e.g. 30+). The game’s messaging also supports this — it has a simple, modern white and black theme, and its messaging is simplistic and sarcastic, with the tagline “A Party Game for Horrible People.”
The game supports 3+ players, but is most fun when played with around 6-8 players. The game begins by the “card czar” (aka, the judge) drawing a black card, and reading it out for all players to hear. Black cards contain sentences/situations that contain a blank space, and the other players aim to create the best (the definition of best can depend on the card czar — some may be more swayed by feasibility/reality, others may prefer humorous responses, etc.) situation by filling it in with one of their white cards. Afterward, the card czar reads all of the completed situations aloud, and picks one as the winner. Play continues with a new card czar until one person has won 7 hands.
The two main types of fun in Cards Against Humanity are expression and fellowship. CAH allows players to express themselves by picking cards that they think best fit the prompt — oftentimes, this allows players to show off their sense of humor, whether it’s slapstick, non-sensical, crass, or deadpan. The wide variety of black and white cards allows all of these types of humor to coexist and flourish — the white cards, for example, range from “Covering myself with parmesan and chili flakes because I am pizza.” to the simple “Magnets.” The simple, easy-to-pickup mechanics also allows players to focus on simply making funny answers, rather than getting bogged down thinking about strategy like in other party games. This focus on laughter also leads to a sense of fellowship, as the main objective of the game eventually becomes less about accumulating 7 points, but more about laughing with your friends at the absurdity of each of the answers.
Cards Against Humanity is heavily influenced by Apples to Apples, a similar game involving a judge choosing between responses to a prompt card. However, CAH’s prompts are much more diverse/flexible than A2A, which simply has adjectives as the green (black/prompt) cards, and nouns as the responses. Additionally, I feel that CAH’s crass/heinous cards fit the type of humor of a matching game better — the fun of A2A is in drawing an absurd connection between the green and red cards, so why not crank up the absurdity with more disturbing/grosser cards as in CAH? This being said, I will admit that CAH is also designed to appeal to my demographic (young adults) much more than A2A, which is marketed as a family/children’s game.
Finally, CAH does involve a sense of vulnerability. While you don’t directly say anything about yourself, playing a card reveals your sense of humor, and invokes a sense of social pressure as you’re essentially betting that other people will find your card (and therefore you) funny. If you’re playing with people you don’t know too well, playing certain cards in certain situations could also be perceived as going “too far,” which could obviously lead to social repercussions/backlash.
