Can you please stop with Cards Against Humanity

boing
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Calling the author stupid is no way to further your argument.

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Ah man, another one? Is that you, Ruben?

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This tells me that the author hasn’t really been playing Cards Against Humanity very well, or even understood the point of playing it. They were probably not the best person to write a “review” of it.

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Ok, so you’re saying CAH is really just an Apples to Apples clone with a bunch of cards like “Surprise Sex” , “Necrophilia”, “Breeding elves for their priceless semen”, “Two midgets shitting in a bucket” and “Pedophiles” thrown in as red herrings for some reason.

Clearly nothing in this game is intended as an invitation to make lame, 13-year-old dead baby level jokes. Anyone who sees it that way is just projecting their own leftist PC beliefs on to it and trying to censor those who just want to have a good time.

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EVERY SINGLE PERSON I know personally who plays this, plays it for just the reason of “it’s SOOO transgressive!” aspect. The surreality created by the randomness of the responses is only really appealing to them BECAUSE it’s “edgy”, just the shock value, not for the surreality itself. It’s the PERFECT opportunity for someone slightly tipsy to giggle because “oooh, shocking, tee-hee!”

Yeah, yeah, “plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’” and all, but given the number of gamers I know who are gaga for this because of the above… Yeah. I’m not impressed. It’s a paint-by-numbers be-a-channer kit. [dismissive wanking motion]
And lemme be explicit here - there’s nothing in my opinion here that’s “you can’t play that, it’s WRONG!”, just “wow, you’re kind of a boring person if you need this crutch to ‘cut loose’,” as is being defended here. Your frozen peaches (not the “game designer’s”) are not being impinged upon, just commenting on the game, its design, and how I’ve seen it played.

(The fact that it’s a top-to-bottom full rules swipe from Apples to Apples, and THEN the creator has the temerity to cry about someone swiping his idea and selling it at Toys’R’Us… “Whining like a little bitch,” indeed. Try and actually be creative, THEN whine about your creativity being stolen. John Kovalic’s comment was bloody hilarious.)
(CORRECTION : I’m incorrect - it was not the “game designer” whining, it was one of the writers for GeekDad. Who also should have known bloody better.)

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This. The whole point of the game (in my view, yada yada) is to figure out what people’s ‘interests’ are and what they will vote for. If you are playing and keep seeing racist/sexist combos come up over and over then it says something about your friends, not the game itself. It’s a really great way to get a better glimpse at people’s personalities.

What I find really hard is playing it with observing Christians, that takes a lot of work to not cross the line. (They wouldn’t care much if I did, but I would get any points, and there really is no reason to be a dick to their beliefs)

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You may well be right! @caryroys summary seemed to shed some light on the nuance - I just thought that block was very quotable and on-topic.

I have no idea how often Robert Florence has played CAH, but he definitely knows his board games.

But then being a non-American I remember a lot of American media frequently referencing MadLibs, a game I think is exclusively played in America (and another game I don’t get).

Is the problem that only Americans enjoy CAH? (unlikely but I’m throwing it out there).

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This is only concerning my own personal life and circumstances…

I want to make sure I have a certain space, in terms of friends, where I can say whatever I want to. I can tell the darkest jokes, that are all kinds of bad, make the dumbest comments and such. Or play a inherently stupid game just for shits and giggles. But that’s what I enjoy - sometimes - what makes me and others laugh. I have no pretense of how low or horrible the things we might have said are. I have no pretense that if someone who might be a target or at least implied in the joke, might feel if that person listened.

Now… I know myself so I am aware of my own values and what I think is right or wrong, so I am very much comfortable with making cruel jokes (in a very whisper-y, “UH, what? No, I didn’t say anything. You must have misheard”-kinda way). On the other hand, if people/friends tell me “jokes” and I know that those people actually believe what they said or considered the joke a “funny truth”, I loose patience and tell them to shut the fuck up. But that’s all so anecdotal & depends on the people I know, its hard to convey those relations over the internet.

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You can make lame jokes, but those jokes don’t win.

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Criticisms of this post, ranked:

  1. Though I understand that the thrust of this post was to point out that Cards of Humanity is a weakly-defined game, it is nonetheless a Rorschach test for the players’ inherent empathy, and if you find yourself in the scenarios described by the author, it’s because your friends are arseholes.

  2. Didn’t bother to read the post, assumed it was about being offended.

  3. Wall of embittered sarcasm presented in the voice of a feminazi who has banned fun.

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I’ve played it in Australia with Americans, Canadians, Indians, Spaniards and South Africans. Everyone had a good laugh.

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Is that an actual card? Because I was beginning to warm to the game, now I’m wondering why anyone on this website would defend it.

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Hence the lack of argument on any forum.

I am totally unclear if you are being serious, or sarcastic, because another of your posts seems to take the opposite tack. SO COMFUZED.

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Absolutely. There’s also cards about dismembered hookers, bleached assholes, and all kinds of other awful things. The game is called Cards Against Humanity, mind. But as many folks have pointed out, the “offensive as possible on purpose” cards are only a percentage of what’s there, and rarely played, because they’re rarely funny and get old fast.

My favorite cards?
“BATMAN!!”
“A robust mongoloid.”
“Bees??”
“Michelle Obama’s arms.”

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Oh, you can find lots of examples with a little googling: https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/cards-against-humanity-answers-12.jpg

For all the whining about how people criticizing it are just playing it wrong with the wrong people, the actual truth is that it’s pretty much a Apples to Apples clone rewritten with a bunch of really lazy “edgy” punchlines that I found hilarious in middle schoool.

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Well, describe what you mean by “positive”?

“I’ve got 99 problems but [chunks of dead prostitute] aint one” at least seems pretty neutral, if not really all that funny and unlikely to win unless everyone submitted something equally bad.

“Linguists have discovered [Richard Nixon] has 57 words for [chunks of dead prostitute]” is definitely negative although probably not in the way you were thinking, and [Jack the Ripper] for the first part would give an admittedly kind of weak but also maybe dark enough to win while not really being “negative” submission, maybe?

At least in my group it would definitely be seen as one of the “weaker” cards you could get in your hand, though.

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Agreed, those cards are a little harder to play, and you have to be clever to win with them.

Some other great cards that are clever entries, but hard to play are:

“Prince Ali, fabulous he, Ali Ababwa”
“Actual mutants with medical conditions and no superpowers”
“Grammar nazis who are also regular Nazis”
“Ryan Gosling riding in on a white horse”
“The folly of man”

etc.

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I find the most interesting failing of the original post’s criticism is to miss out on how the game reveals a group’s mindset. Perhaps when dumb people play it, there’s only amusement at easy jokes, but when you’re playing it with a group of decent folk, a lot of the amusement is figuring out what the other people find funny.

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Depending how dark you like your humor, one of the worst (best?) entries I saw played was:

“As Michael Jackson was lying on his death bed, the last thing to go through his head was ___________.”

“Jerking off into a pool of children’s tears”

Played in a group of beer swilling IT nerds, landslide victory.

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Eh, writing off the entire game over one card is like writing off Louis CK’s entire career because he once made a bad joke about overweight women. He did, and it was a bad joke, but it’d be pretty obtuse to just ignore everything else he’s done because of that.

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