Cards Against Humanity, The Worst Game Since.....Incest Pterodactyls

This post might be slightly behind the times, because the general CAH fad has slowly died an inevitable (and probably hilariously inappropriate) death, but somebody brought it up the other day and I wanted the opportunity to talk briefly about why it's so abysmal. It's a game I've heard mentioned a lot, and hardly ever heard openly derided. I guess criticizing it makes you seem stuffy, politically correct, or just plain boring. You don't want to be the one guy who isn't laid back enough to play charades, why get in the way of everybody's fun? But there's an important difference: charades is great and cards against humanity is about as fun as Hitler removing your anus with an old sewing machine.

Is it an asshole? Is it Tim? Erm. Tim...Tim the asshole? God, TIm's such an asshole. Asshole TIm? How many syllables?

Simply put, the game is bad, let me explain. The rules of the game itself are terrible. The person who is the winner, is the person who's pairings are the funniest. One participant is validated as the funniest person, and the implication is that the other players are less funny than them. Not just, funny in a different way, but objectively less funny. That's such a terrible way of judging anything! What a horrible thing to do! Telling someone they're not funny, is one of the cruelest things you can say; it's like calling someone boring, in that it's completely impossible to prove one way or the other. Even arguing against it just makes you look petty and actually strengthens their accusation. Maybe I'm overly sensitive about being considered funny or not funny because it's more than a passing interest for me. But a lot of people feel this way. Think about how many studies list 'having a sense of humour' as consistently the most popular answer to reasons for being attracted to someone. There was even that whole episode of Friends when Chandler freaked out because Monica started saying that there was someone funnier than him at her work. When you sit down to play this game, you're guaranteeing that the end result of it will be "This one individual, you are the funniest, now everyone else feel a bit bad about themselves." You're Chandler-ing everyone. It's like playing a game of wink murder, but then at the end the winner is just the person who has the prettiest eyes.

The structure of how bad these rules are is endlessly irritating. The winning thing is such a clear afterthought for the designers. They have come up with the bulk of the idea and then thought, crap, how does the game end? I don't know, maybe they vote and one person is the funny-winner. Yeah, hell that'll do. Let's go make money.

Could this BE a better picture for breaking up the last two paragraphs?

So I could go on about how the winning/losing element of it is awful for ages. Comedy is naturally subjective blahblahblah. Okay, fine. But for a game which is about making comedy scenarios, it leaves you with precious few choices. Not in the cards themselves (I bet there's loads of them by now) but stylistically, the types of jokes you can make is narrowly limited. Here they are: Shock,......maybe also surrealism (a bit)

So shock: I'm not anti-shock humour. At all. It's much harder to do than people think. Yes it can be done lazily, but it's also one of the best ways to subvert a joke, particularly if it comes completely out of left field. One of the other biggest flaws to CAH is that once you understand what the game is (i.e played it once), you're expecting to be shocked. If people are expecting to be shocked, regular shock humour can't work, you would have to raise the stakes, go for even more shock! Subvert it and don't do shock, do normal. Then do reeeal shock. Eventually you have to give up, retire your shock, then un-retire it, then properly retire it and become a political pundit for the guardian.

Surrealism I guess: Your other option then, is to go for surrealism. Make a pairing that is so random that it hardly makes sense but perhaps has a strange kind of twisted logic to it. "Ghandi's father was a laptop charger from the Peak District." This doesn't have any shock value to it, but the imagery is strange enough that people might go for it. Of course that isn't a CAH card, I thought of it myself after 5 seconds of thinking and I'm not even good at coming up with random surrealist ideas. That's another huge problem, is that the cards themselves intrinsically take the challenge and the joy of true random comedy. I have a friend called Jak, with a genius IQ (who writes a great video game blog called 103%). His brain works in such a fascinating way, that the random things he says seem completely detached from any kind of reality. It's ludicrously fast thinking. And half the time it's totally worthless nonsense, but the other half of the time, there's a strange art to the construction of these bizarre images he conjures up. There's another article in the idea of "random comedy" itself. But essentially, if your random idea was written on a card, and all you did was place it next to the words "I hate it when....." it defeats almost the whole point.

Someone once told me that if you ask most people to think of something random, they'll almost always say either 'badger', or 'cheese'. Interesting huh?

Plus, once you're even slightly familiar with the cards that are in the deck, the game must surely lose all meaning. You can buy an expansion I guess. Don't do that though. Please.

Lighten up though, it's just a game, lots of people enjoy it, I don't have the right to take that away from them. Well no. Don't lighten up. Do take it seriously. There's lots of other great board games to play that get no mainstream attention, but this swept the world like it was UNO. What about people with little to no imagination though Tom? What are you supposed to play if you're an unfunny shitmuncher? Guess what, I don't subscribe to that nonsense. Call it cheesy, but everyone has the potential to be creative and funny when put into the right position. Something like charades, mafia/werewolf, even snap gives people the opportunity for more independent thought. CAH humanity doesn't allow unfunny people to be funny, it tells people what is funny, then sets a rule system that demands that we crown one person the temporary winner of creativity. I'm not the prescriptivist here, the game-makers are.

This is the end of the article, but it could have so easily been 5x the length....because we take board games pretty seriously here at WMD. How seriously? This seriously: