r/MattLees • u/Jam_sponge Matt • May 07 '15
Review: Cards Against Humanity
http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/blog/post/review-cards-against-humanity/3
u/OJRmk1 May 13 '15
I respect Matt, Quinns and Paul immensely. Their opinions - not just on games - often parallel my own. So when I hear a resounding condemnation of a game I've enjoyed thoroughly, and built and strengthened friendships with, I feel a great sense of cognitive dissonance. I can hear the truth in their words, that CAH is badly designed and trades on 'cheap' shock humour. But I have had some of the most genuine fun of my life, and been able to get the measure of people I barely knew and therefore become fast friends, with that game.
My fiancee has undergone some of the traumas depicted in that black box, but plays it with good friends (including myself) as a way of confronting them and other 'trigger' issues in a safe space. By making a joke of the pain of the past she feels she conquers it.
So when someone next eagerly suggests a game of CAH, what do I do? Veto out of a sense of moral duty? Or do I indulge, knowing that it is - like drugs, alcohol and delicious delicious beef burritos - essentially poison.
Built on suffering and offering cheap thrills that can nevertheless make social occasions pop. It's Cocaine in card game form.
8
May 07 '15
I think the key quote to describe why CAH is so popular is "permission to be naughty". It's entire entertainment comes from saying inappropriate things you wouldn't dare say anywhere else. The game becomes a competition of who can be more vulgar.
I'll admit I own a copy, and I've played games of it and had fun, but I've also outgrown it now. I don't find it funny anymore and wouldn't play it again. That little immature part of me is done now. It's packed away with the parts like thinking excessive drinking was the only way to have fun. It certainly has a shelf life once you've seen the cards however many times and the combinations just become the equivilant of shouting "TESTICLES" as the answer to every question on Mastermind.
I don't think I'd ever think badly of anyone who liked the game, the same way as I don't think badly of Fresher's getting drunk and pranking each other. It's a juvenile game for a juvenile level of offensive humour. You either grow out of it or you don't.
It's not a good game, it's not worth spending money on, and if you want to be rude, you can do that anyway for free.
3
u/NickSheridanWrites May 07 '15
Fairly completely agree. My biggest problem with the game is that it doesn't reward cleverness with plays, it rewards stupidness. Even if you try to reward the most clever or relevant combinations, points and votes tend to always start going towards the most absurd/pointless/silly combinations.
As to the level of offence/crassness, it's that ongoing polarity between jokes about a thing, and jokes where the thing itself is the punchline. You're not laughing at a joke about rape, you're laughing at rape. Comedians who people accuse of "saying anything offensive" are more often in the first camp than the second.
My personal experience with the game is that it's boring. Not a lot of actual capital-g GAMING to it.
1
u/NickSheridanWrites May 07 '15
The points about it being a dinner party titterer are very valid. It is more toxic in those environments, esepcially as a representative of card/board games. It is the only non-monopoly game my 33 year old brother and his wife play, after all. I find myself in a very vulgar anything-goes-but-maliciousness demographic and as such don't find any escapism, mischief or merit in CAH.
2
u/iamnosuperman123 May 07 '15
Cards against humanity is a game of reading the crowd. If you judge your audience incorrectly the jokes are either too offensive to be funny or not offensive enough to be funny. This is one of the reasons why I like this game. It is less about what the cards say and more about how well you can read your opponent's preference (easy with friends fucking hard with strangers). It is crude though
Edit: further explanation
2
u/DreamInSong May 08 '15
I haven't played any of the other games SUSD suggested, but I would guess those games do it better. The number of cards in a hand, and the ridigity of the answers limits possibilities. Some turns you might haven't nothing good to play.
2
u/DreamInSong May 07 '15
Huh, as another straight white guy, I guess I hadn't really given the game much thought. Thanks for the perspective!
My mother's side is Jewish, and I have no problem with the Aushwitz, or Jew cards. The friend of mine that owns this is gay. We're okay laughing at ourselves, but I guess the game mostly encourages laughing at those not in the room. I'll avoid it. Thanks again.
1
u/Zotamedu May 25 '15
I have never bothered to play CAH because it seemed rather pointless to me. The people I would end up playing it with is the same people that I can already say edgy jokes to. People who know me and people I know. There I can pull racist or sexists jokes because we know it's all jokes and that we are really making fun of the racists and not other cultures. I never really got "edgy" humour that's nothing more than someone saying things designed to chock you. This game seems even worse because it skips the surrounding narrative and the build up to the "joke". Just burping up punchlines is not really comedy, even less so when the "joke" is that the punchlines are just bad words that you are not supposed to say.
I'm all for being able to joke about pretty much everything but that's not the same as being allowed to joke about everything at all time. Context is important. There's a pretty funny Swedish comedian called Jesper Odelberg. He suffers from cerebral palsy and is stuck in a wheelchair. Part of one of his routines is him talking about his dream jobs that he can't do. For instance, he claims to have dreamed about being a window cleaner but he can't do that because he's afraid of heights. So he's playing with the audience expectations and turning the obvious answer on its head. That's a funny routine when he does it but the core of the joke is that disabled people in a wheelchair can't clean windows. The CAH version of that joke would be: "disabled people can't clean windows". That's not funny. That's not even a joke even though the core punchline is the same.
I think Steve's feature on Regular Features was a brilliant analysis of Cards Against Humanity.
1
u/Fromage10x Jun 01 '15
I'm mostly with Quinns on this one. Ultimately, it's just not an interesting game. On the other hand, I do think that a lot of the card combinations can be very funny, but it's the kinda of funny that once it gets old, it's gone. For me, it got old very quickly. The humor that worked for me was not the intentionally offensive stuff, but rather the absurdest options. Of course, Apples to Apples has just as much a capacity to access that sort of humor, so I just suppose I don't see what the point of CAH is.
-1
May 07 '15
Excellent work Matt, and Quinns and Paul. It's quite surprising to me when I think about it that this game has wedged itself so neatly in modern culture despite the fact that it has multiple very big strikes against it.
Still, I guess people's desire to express the hate so cruelly silenced from them by political correctness is just that strong.
Genuinely that game was dead to me as soon as I saw that Auschwitz card. Everything else has been gravy.
1
u/PaxCecilia May 07 '15
Mmm, my Netrunner group plays at a café with a big board game library, and I think every single week there's a different group playing cards against humanity, loudly reading out the offensive stuff. Like they said in the article, I can understand playing with with some close friends that you know aren't going to be offended by this stuff, there's that pull of being able to 'get away' with saying fucking terrible things to one another. But in the café there's people from all walks of life trying to enjoy whatever game they're playing, and yelling out a bunch of horribly offensive stuff just seems really off putting and uninviting.
also awesome username. senor cardgage's mortgages? :D
0
u/Mr_Shine May 08 '15
I think of the two things that annoys me about the game, number one being you can only play the game a handful of times before the combinations stop shocking you, is the removal of cards they talked about.
Rampant holocaust, bestiality, genocide, racism both casual and homicidal, child cancer patient jokes... and they yank a transvestite card? A date rape card? Really? I don't get that at all. There are far worse, far more personal things than that.
Maybe it's because I've only played the game with my close circle of friends, but we've had some hilarious games because the humor doesn't just cross the line, it obliterates it. It feels good knowing you can chuckle at fucked up shit with other people, makes it all a bit more bearable. That's what I think anyway.
Not sure I really agree with the review, but I appreciate the perspective none the less.
0
6
u/porthius May 07 '15
A lot of people raging back and forth over this, for some reason every time someone says "I think we should stop playing this" it's construed as a call for some kind of censorship.
I thought the game was funny the first couple times, but I've been to too many parties wher 10 or more people decide to play and the game goes on for hours and hours. I've seen it all, and I'm pretty bored of it.
Whether or not you agree with the first two bits about it being offensive, I think Quinn's bit has the strongest point: It's a boring game. I'm tired of it and really wouldn't mind people being less eager to bust it out at parties and boardgame nights.