We’re repeating this article as so many of you have been asking about what fun game to give folks who aren’t RPG gamers – Enjoy! Purchase the game from Amazon here!

Charles and his wife hosted a dinner party this last Friday. (Picture related. Surprisingly, neither Charles nor I are in the picture, unless you count my badass head* in the far right.) It was a classy evening: burritos were constructed, nerdy discussion was had, and cocktails were consumed. (My favorite being Charles’s take on the Ragnarok, a flagship cocktail from the Grizzled Wizard here in Seattle.) But the centerpiece of the evening wasn’t the conversation, as nerdy as it was. It’s wasn’t the drinks, as world-ending as they might have seemed. The centerpiece was the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Dead Parents.

That night fourteen people sat down to play Cards Against Humanity. While the majority of the people at the table had played the game with each other, there were enough fresh faces to remind all of the veteran exactly how awful we all are for enjoying this game.

A Brief Aside to Explain Ourselves

What is Cards Against Humanity? The short answer: It’s a hilarious and distasteful version of Apples to Apples that you can’t play with your parents. (Probably.)

Cards Against Humanity is very simple. In fact, the entire rules of the game are available on the publisher’s website. The “Card Czar” starts his or her turn by drawing a black card and reading it out loud. The black cards are (largely) direct questions or a sentence with a blank. All of the other players look at their hands of an amount white cards that have very inappropriate answers on them. Each player picks the white card that they feel is the “best” response to the black card and hands it to the Card Czar face down. When all of the other players have handed in a card, Card Czar reveals them one by one to the group without know who played it. He or she picks the “winner”, the person that played that particular card gets a point, everyone draws a white card to fill their hand, and the next person around the table becomes Card Czar. Rinse and repeat until you feel like your soul has had enough.

To use a real example:

Black card: “Why am I sticky?”

White card: “Two midgets shitting into a bucket.”

So many excellent things are all simultaneously happening! First, your friend had to read outloud in front of his or her peers “two midgets shitting into a bucket”. And now the table is picturing not only the logistics of two midgets shitting into a bucket, but why that’s making that particular player so sticky. And you’re also comparing that answer to the others that were played, so you get to contrast and compare between your the Card Czar becoming sticky via dual midget dumps and, say, “Tasteful sideboob”. Which is better? What is “better”? And why do you find this so fun? Who am I? You’ll ask yourself a lot of questions while you play this game.

Any group of like-minded and socially-unconscionable adults can enjoy this game. You can learn how to play in mere moments; the game seems designed to promote “jump in and out whenever” gameplay by not caring about the rules as much as it cares about generating laughter. Even the game itself is coy about how one “wins” the game, a “winner” is never specifically mentioned in the core rules. Presumably, the player with the most points wins, but think about that for a moment. If you have the most points in this game, are you a winner?

It’s worth mentioning that the game is released under a Creative Commons license, you can download and print the game for free and physical copies are sold directly from the publisher to the consumer for a reasonable price. Considering that the game features a cum-guzzling Pac Man, there’s a lot to admire here.

Shameful Team Building

Cards Against Humanity is a game about pushing boundaries and exploration. It’s a game where you say and contemplate awful things, and like all comedy, it brings people together.

When you sit down to play, you find out quickly that you already know how to “do” Cards Against Humanity. You already know how to laugh at things like AIDs, racism, and Jesus. You already know that, when taken out of context, comparing something to the Holocaust is actually comedic gold. This is the game’s prestige: it’s already within you. It takes that veil of civility that you’ve draped over yourself and it casts it aside, revealing the monster underneath that can find abortion jokes funny.

And, honestly, this release is incredibly valuable. Shedding that veil and passing that “Dickfingers” card to a friend is a surprisingly potent recipe for bonding. Finding that intimate common ground, even if that common ground may be “things so god damn atrocious that they’re disarming”, is a beautiful thing that shouldn’t be ignored.

I can’t suggest playing this game more. Last Friday was an amazing time, and not just because I don’t remember much of the night after that Ragnarok. Gather up four to fourteen of your most horrible friends, have a few drinks, and buy/print Cards Against Humanity immediately. You won’t be disappointed.

* I had intended to write “baldass”, but same diff!