Cards Against Humanity was a great game in highschool and always a good laugh. Now, the idea of bringing it out during a game night, regardless of the group of people, is likely to end in widespread groans. Sitting on my shelf unused for over 5 years, I sought to design a new game using the same cards.

My main critiques of the original game were the following:

• There’s too much sitting and waiting around to play a card or for the judge to select a winner. This scaled with the number of people.
• There’s limited strategy involved. The primary strategy is to play to the judge’s humor and predict their thought process. The problem is this relied on “winner” cards which players have no control over obtaining.

I wanted a game that was much more involved and required more strategy for where you choose to play your cards and when.

From this, I developed the ruleset below.

Rules

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Playtesting

The base play received positive reviews. Some comments:

• colored player tokens would be helpful for tracking who played what and where
• Selecting the judge was confusing at first, then made more sense
• Was way more engaging and faster paced than original game

Advanced play comments:

• Difficult to track scoring
• Everyone was more motivated to just play the base version and ignore the additional rules

Verdict

This version of CAH is better than the original, but in general the game still just sucks. Whether it’s our age or our previous memories of the game, the old found humor and fun in the game seems to be lost permanently.