The game I played is Cards Against Humanity. It was designed by Josh Dillon, Daniel, Dranove, Eli Halpern, Ben Hantoot, David Munk, David Pinsof, Max Temkin, and Eliot Weinstein, and was published as Cards Against Humanity LLC as a complete analog card game in year 2011.
(I found this photo on the Wikipedia page.)
It’s designed for any number of players greater than 3 to even 20+ with age 17+. It’s a crazy game, the more people get drunk, the more fun it will produce. It should be played among a group of familiar friends instead of strangers, and the target audience is those who do not care much about political correctness, because some cards are quite intruding. There are several cards involving hell jokes.
The mechanics of the game is as follows:
- At the beginning, each player draws 5 white cards.
- Loop until the black card deck or the white card deck is empty:
- Each player takes turn to be the judge, drawing a black card and showing it publicly to all other players.
- Then, each of the other players selects one white card from their hands, which, in their opinion, relates closest to the black card, and puts the card facing down on the table.
- After all of the other players have selected a white card, everyone shows the context of the chosen white card.
- The judge selects the card they likes the best, and gives the black card to the player who chose the corresponding card.
- The player with the greatest number of black cards wins.
It is a player vs. player race game, where the goal of the players is to win the greatest number of black cards.
If being the judge, the player can choose the player to give the black card to; otherwise, the player can choose the card that they thinks the judge would like.
The magic circle is the room containing all of the players. Since we did not grow up in the US culture, we searched several words and deeper meanings. So I think the internet might also be within the magic circle, because there’s a lot of fun searching those words and figuring out the meaning too.
Formally, it is zero-sum, because the total number of black cards is fixed. However, when actually playing it, I felt we cared more about the fun and funniness involved in the game instead of caring about the number of cards gained. Theoretically, the best strategy for this type of zero-sum game is to give the black card to the player with least number of black cards when being the judge, but none of us did that because it’s not fun any more.
The game focuses on expression. To get the black card, we always argue a lot on why our own cards are the best fit and the funniest and craziest. Sometimes we add our past experience as reference and jokes to address that. The game also has a submission part in it, because non-judge players need to select a white card that fits the black card.
One thing the game could improve is that, being Asians growing up in Asia, we did not find many related jokes. The names on the cards are not familiar to us. Even though the search process is interesting too, I think it would be better to add more cards making jokes of more cultures to incorporate more diverse audience. Or, maybe having different versions of the game for different cultures. Besides, I think the newer generation might not be able to get all of those names neither, so I think evolving the contexts of cards might be a good idea.
Another game I’m thinking of is Trial By Trolley, in which the judge also takes turns, and the non-judge players are divided into two teams to put descriptions on the two trolley trails, to let the judge select the other trail to drive through. The goal of the game is not to be selected by the judge as much as possible.
- What I know is that the cards in Trial By Trolley is evolving every several years, so I think this part is better than Cards Against Humanity.
- The cards in Trial By Trolly has images on them, so even though sometimes there are words we don’t know, it’s easy for us to guess. In contrast, the cards in Cards Against Humanity are all black and white without graffiti, which makes it more difficult for us to guess.
- Cards Against Humanity is more balanced. There’re always some ways to argue for each cards. This is better because several cards in Trial By Trolly are considered as “winning cards”, drawing which would never lose the round.
In short, Cards Against Humanity is a great game for closer friends. I didn’t play it with strangers, but I would imagine it would be weird to say the same thing as I did in front of those friends to strangers.
