Cards Against Humanity

About

Cards Against Humanity is a party game featuring Mad Libs style cards in which players try to match white "answer" cards" containing a noun or a gerund, with a black "question" card containing a fill-in-the-blank statement. The game is often compared to the more family-friendly precursor Apples to Apples.

Rules

To play Cards Against Humanity, each player begins with ten white cards each. Then one player designated as the "card czar draws a black card, which poses a question or has a statement with one or more blank. Each player then plays one card they think will fit with the black card in the funniest way. The card czar selects their favorite, and that player receives the black card. This process then repeats with a new card czar.

There are several alternative ways to play including “God is Dead,” when players work without a card czar, and “Never Have I Ever,” when players may discard cards they don’t understand as long as they admit their lack of knowledge to the group.^[5]

Online History

The game was created by a group of friends for a New Year’s Eve party in March 2011. It was then uploaded to their website CardsAgainstHumanty.com^[5] where people can download a printable version of the cards for free.

Kickstarter Campaign

On December 10th, 2010 Max Temkin created a Kickstarter Campaign^[1] to create a printed box set. Pledging $15 dollars would get backers the box set, while $30 would get them the set as well as 16 custom printed cards. The project received well over their $4,000 goal, and when it ended on January 30th, they had raised over $15,000. Following the success of their crowdfunding campaign in 2010, a printed card set became available for purchase in 2012.

Ladies Against Humanity

Ladies Against Humanity^[2] is a Tumblr blog created by Kate Stayman-London^[3] on January 8th, 2014. The blog features images of Cards Against Humanity style cards with female-centric jokes created by Stayman-London or submitted by other Tumblr users.

Headlines Against Humanity

Headlines Against Humanity is a website created in January 2014 devoted to examining "click bait" headlines. On the homepage two cards stylized like Cards Against Humanity cards each contain a headline; one real, and one fake. Visitors to the site click on the card they believe to be the real headline and the card flips revealing if their guess was correct.

Pretend You're Xyzzy

Pretend You're Xyzzy^[6] is an online clone of Cards Against Humanity with the ability to add custom online card decks to play with through services like Cardcast. The service became popular as a way to play the card game without buying a set, along with the additional customization which allowed for custom sets based on fandoms.

Secret Hitler

On November 23rd, 2015, co-creator Max Temkin, video game maker Mike Boxleiter, and author Tommy Maranges opened up their Kickstarter^[7] for their board game, Secret Hitler. In the game, players are divided into liberals and fascists, though only the players know their identity, and the fascists work to install their leader in 1930s Germany. The game made over 1.4 million dollars, nearly tripling its goal of 54,000 dollars. On February 24th, 2017, two months before the game's release, Temkin tweeted that he had sent copies to every U.S. Senator as a message to the government, implying that they would find the experience useful while serving during a Donald Trump presidency.

👉 We sent a copy of Secret Hitler to every U.S. Senator: pic.twitter.com/38tMVfmP6a

— Max Temkin (@MaxTemkin) February 24, 2017

Cards Against Humanity Saves America

On November 14th, 2017, Cards Against Humanity announced their holiday promotion entitled "Cards Against Humanity Saves America." The promotion includes five secret give aways for customers who sign up during this time. To announce the campaign, the company uploaded a video set in the future about how Cards Against Humanity saved America.

That day, they announced their first promotion, "Cards Against Humanity Stops The Wall."^[8] The company promised to buy plots of land along the U.S.-Mexican border and fight the U.S. government in court if they tried build Trump's Border Wall. In their description of the promotion, the company wrote:

"Donald Trump is a preposterous golem who is afraid of Mexicans. He is so afraid that he wants to build a twenty-billion dollar wall that everyone knows will accomplish nothing. So we’ve purchased a plot of vacant land on the border and retained a law firm specializing in eminent domain to make it as time-consuming and expensive as possible for the wall to get built.

On Day 1, all Cards Against Humanity Saves America recipients will get an illustrated map of the land, a certificate of our promise to fight the wall, some new cards, and a few other surprises."

The promotion reached the front page of the /r/NotTheOnion ^[9] and /r/politics^[10] subreddit, where it received more than 60,000 points each.

That day, Twitter ^[11] published a Moments page to archive some of the reactions to the promotion.

Search Interest

External References