Cards Against Humanity (CAH) is a judging game created by Max Temkin and his high school friends. Its target audience is ages 17+ due to its adult, inappropriate humor. Its platform is on the tabletop (physical card game). The game goes as follows: each round, a player draws a black card with a prompt (e.g., “Why can’t I sleep at night?”), and others submit white cards with possible answers. The judge (the winner of the previous round) chooses the funniest, most shocking, or cleverest answer. The game initially succeeds through shock value but ultimately fails to keep players engaged due to overreliance on this shock value, which makes it predictable and repetitive. The game goes from spontaneous humor into a psychological exercise of pandering to judges, creating social dynamics that can strengthen in-group bonds but also alienate others. These contradictions point to a fundamental flaw: its core mechanics prioritize immediate reactions and psychological analysis over evolving gameplay.
Looking at Fullerton’s formal elements (Ch. 3), CAH has a hybrid pattern of player interaction – multiple individual players compete in parallel, and the judge serves not as an opponent but as an evaluator of the game to award points and add to a player’s score. It is similar to multilateral competition, but the judge – a rotating role across players – awards points. This is similar to “multiple individual players versus game” from the reading with the human judge element. This unusual pattern can create an uneven power dynamic that helps explain by the social aspects of the game can overpower over time.
I noticed that many CAH black cards pose a relatively innocent question, and judges typically enjoy it when innocent questions are juxtaposed with raunchy, out-of-pocket, or simply unexpected humor. Below is an example of this in the game I set up with my friends:
Here, the prompt sounds like a child trying to get its mother’s attention, and it’s clear that most participants took the direction of unexpected or raunchy humor. The card that ended up winning, “Chinese President Xi Jinping,” also pandered to the judge at hand who said previously in the game, “If a China-related card comes around when I judge, it’s gonna win.” The juxtaposition of a child-sounding card and an adult topic (whether it’s something raunchy or something in the news) is clearly funny, and this can be gamified by the players. While the contrast is a clever premise, this game thrives on the players answering the question, “What is the most abnormal or different card relative to the prompt that I can play?” This has led to the game feeling trite. My friend Carolyn said, “I love Cards Against Humanity, but only a few times a year, maybe. It just gets old.” I asked Carolyn why she feels that way, and she said, “There’s a lot of things. I think it relies too much on creating a shock, and that feeling of shock becomes old after it happens so many times. Also, when you play this often, you remember lots of the cards, so the randomness aspect of it goes away.” I feel the same way. I think this game catered a lot more to me when I was in high school when adult topics were still “new,” but now, it feels a bit old and redone. I also felt like, in most rounds, I knew which card was going to win based on the judge, and I knew that most people at the table would have probably picked a different one. This made me realize that a lot of people, including myself, treat CAH as a psychological game: “How can I best pander to the judge?” In a sense, this could become a game of closeness and friendship: “How well do I know the judge? Well enough to know which of my cards they would like most?” On another note, because CAH is a game of adult topics that are random, raunchy, and geared toward adult humor, it can alienate groups who feel as though this humor is too edgy for them. My friend Anabella said, “I don’t really know what these cards mean,” when she was judging. The cards below, incredibly lewd, were the cards she had to judge, and it made her uncomfortable with how foreign the content was for her.
Here are some suggestions to address some of the above issues. Because some of the cards are memorized and create an over-reliance on the shock/contrast effect previously mentioned, players could have the power to create custom cards. Rounds could be introduced in which players can write their own answers, similar to Apples to Apples Freestyle. This keeps the game from getting too stale since the players can direct the humor and content of the game. From a formal elements perspective (Fullerton), this change could expand the resources available to players and add elements of player creativity, which could add to the “Expression” and “Discovery” aesthetics (Hunicke et al.).
Also, because cards containing edgy humor could make players uncomfortable, CAH could split its decks into themes to make them more accessible to wider audiences (i.e. Family-Friendly, Politics, Raunchy, etc.). This way, it could capture a wider audience – maybe the family audience, like that of Apples to Apples – that does not alienate anyone; the game already has many different decks, but variation within a deck would make gameplay more interesting, different, and inclusive across plays. This addresses Fullerton’s concept of boundaries by creating more flexible conceptual boundaries that can adapt to different player groups.
CAH’s judging mechanic can make players feel left out or even embarrassed if their card doesn’t get picked, especially when humor is subjective and often hinges on shock value. I felt that way when a card I put that I thought was very strong was not picked by the judge. In CAH, the humor often rewards edginess or outrageousness, so sensitive or thoughtful answers might get overlooked. While it can be funny for some, it can also feel like a form of social rejection, especially in groups where people aren’t equally close or comfortable. Earlier I had mentioned that CAH feels like a game of closeness at times; it can also be an indicator of how not close someone is with a judge, and that can sting. This emotional response comes directly from what Fullerton calls the conflict element in games – in CAH, the conflict comes from competing for the judge’s favor, which will inevitably create winners and losers in a subjective context.
In terms of responsibility, I believe it is a shared one. Designers of judging games like CAH should offer alternative forms of play, like anonymous voting or collaborative scoring, that shift the focus away from one judge making decisions on everyone else’s cards. This suggestion would change the game’s unusual player interaction pattern to something closer to what Avedon would classify as either “multilateral competition” or even “cooperative play” (Fullerton), where evaluation is distributed rather than centered on a single judge, potentially creating a more balanced social dynamic.
Ultimately, though, the players shape the end experience. Every player should pay attention to group dynamics and support one another, especially in judging games. Self-awareness is also key: if someone knows they’re likely to feel hurt in that kind of setup, it’s valid for them to opt out of the game or suggest a different game. Games should be fun and inclusive for every player, not just the loudest or most outrageous players. This lines up with Hunicke et al.’s perspective that games should be designed with the player experience (aesthetics) as the primary consideration, working backward through dynamics and mechanics to create meaningful engagement.
