Games I love: Cards Against Humanity

Work has been absolutely insane for a couple weeks and I've barely had time to game, let alone write about it.  However, last Thursday I got to go to board game night in Santa Cruz on the 4th of July.  We played a few different games, but the one that I feel most driven to write about is Cards Against Humanity.

An upfront warning...  Cards Against Humanity is definitely Not Safe For Work.  It's offensive.  It's rude.  It'll make you wonder if your friends (and yourself) are actually bad people.  However, it's also hilarious.  Where else can the secret to profit be Sean Connery and Glenn Beck's horrible death?  Or the world end not with a bang but with a mopey zoo lion?  I'm keeping my examples PC, but it gets much, much worse (or better?).

I think the value of Cards Against Humanity is it gives a moment to tease your friends and let out the darker, more sarcastic bits of our natures.  Everyone has their line that they won't cross, even in CAH, and that's good.  But at the same time, it's good to see what combinations can really get together.  It's cathartic in the way a black humor comedy is cathartic.  It lets you take off the burden of keeping your frustrations and irritations in check by giving an outlet of the cards.  And it's easy enough to simply remove the most offensive cards (because, to be fair there's a good number about sex or race that could be over-the-line offensive) and leave the rest for slightly less invidious play.

Even better is the chance to make your own cards.  We've done that with a number of our in-jokes, adding cards for Johnny Depp, Robert Downey Junior, Wil Wheaton, a goat with a can, wakka wakka, and "I can take it!", among others, to the game and frequently we come up with more things to add.  If nothing else, Cards Against Humanity spins off the genre of games like Dixit and Apples to Apples in a way that could probably be emulated in a more PC way, but also generates a good deal of it's fun from allowing players to feel like "anything can be said."

So if you're not easily offended, or are willing to do some deck-editing, Cards Against Humanity is definitely worth a shot.