Cards Against Humanity - TV Tropes

Cards Against Humanity is what happens when you make a party game out of an unholy union of Apples to Apples, Mad Libs, and Refuge in Audacity.

Players start with 10 white cards, each with a different noun, conceptual statement, or similar phrase. The judge, officially known as the "Card Czar," reads a black card, which has a question or statement with at least one blank. The players then play a white card (or cards) for the Card Czar to evaluate, and the Card Czar chooses the winner. Players draw back up to 10 cards, and the next person in rotation becomes the Card Czar.

Much like Apples to Apples, there is a theoretical win condition, but it's frequently played just to see who can be the most hilariously inappropriate.

The cards can be downloaded for free to print yourself, and are also available for purchase on actual card stock. There is a web version that includes the expansions and allows players to make their own card packs with HTML support, and a different web version that has more customizable rules, allows for the played white cards to be flipped one at time by the czar, and allows for blank cards to be filled with images from the web. (There was another web version, but it was unfortunately discontinued.)

At Gen Con 2013, the CAH creators hosted a competition reality show called Tabletop Deathmatch for up-and-coming dev teams, with a first printing of their game as a reward. The show was judged by a panel of industry professionals and produced by LoadingReadyRun, and airs here.

The March 19, 2015 episode of TableTop was dedicated to Cards Against Humanity.

Funnily enough, Apples to Apples has its own competitor, Rotten Apples ^note .

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General tropes:

• The '90s: The theme of the "90s Nostalgia Pack", including cards like "The Great Cornholio.", "Pure Moods, Vol. 1", and "Stabbing the shit out of a Capri Sun."
• Black Comedy: Much of the appeal of the game. In fact, some of the white cards are perfectly innocuous things (like Heartwarming Orphans) just to bring how terrible some of the other cards are into sharp relief, as well as to highlight how off-color some players' senses of humor are.
• Body Horror: Some cards are rather gruesome.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Like Apples to Apples, "playing to the judge" is highly encouraged.
• Butt-Monkey: Two of the biggest and most consistent ones are Glenn Beck and Henry Goto.
• Content Warnings: The game itself doesn't have one, but for the episode of TableTop that featured CAH, Wil Wheaton made a point to break the show's normal format and start off with a warning that that episode would be outrageously offensive.
• Department of Redundancy Department: It's possible to do this.

  Play: In M. Night Shyamalan's new movie, Bruce Willis discovers that [Sarah Palin] had really been [Sarah Fuckin' Palin] all along.

  Play: Before I run for president, I must destroy all evidence of my involvement with [Destroying the evidence].

• Double Entendre: The bigger, blacker box, which comes with a small expansion pack about boxes.
• Easter Egg:
  • If you have "The Bigger, Blacker Box", tear away at the top of the lid. There is a white card that says "The biggest, blackest dick" in silver lettering.
  • First-edition orders of the Theatre Pack had a very small chance of being replaced by its "understudy", the Cats Pack. Said pack came bundled with an apology and a complete refund for buying the regular version.
• Expansion Pack: As of 2017, three main expansion boxes: the ^{Red Box}, ^{Blue Box}, and Green Box, each containing 300 cards.
  • Specially themed bonus packs of 30 cards; current packs offered include the Period Pack, College Pack, 90s Nostalgia Pack, Weed Pack, Food Pack, Fantasy Pack, Sci-Fi Pack, Geek Pack, Science Pack, Design Pack, World Wide Web Pack, Pride Pack, and Theatre Pack. Most of these packs are co-written with outside collaborators and/or benefit a charity.
  • Not to mention various limited edition releases, the annual holiday promotions, and third party expansions (like Crabs Adjust Humidity). A cohesive spreadsheet of all official CAH products and many third party expansions is now available here.
• Game Mod: The base set and expansions include blanks for making up new cards.
• The Ghost: The Random Number God, Rando Cardrissian, which takes the form of random cards used to answer the black cards. This usually turns him into a Cloud Cuckoo Lander, since the responses rarely make any sense.
• God Is Dead: This is the name for one of the suggested house rules.

  Play without a Card Czar. Each player picks his or her favorite card each round. The card with the most points wins the round.

• Historical In-Joke: Some of the cards such as the black and white pair "What do white people like?" "The Three Fifths Compromise". Whether or not these are funny, let alone being seen as funny, depends on who you play with as does most cards.
• Inherently Funny Words: Hilariously deconstructed. While the words are inherently funny, the situation they are involved in is not.

  White Card: Helplessly giggling at the mention of Hutus and Tutsis.

• Insistent Terminology: Anytime the "Bees?" card gets drawn, expect everyone to say the word with a ridiculously overemphasized questioning tone, if not an overly hammy one in one's best Nicolas Cage impersonation.
• Junior Variant: A print-and-play expansion that was released tones down the crass nature of the game with black and white cards that are more family-friendly. This eventually got a physical release as Cards Against Humanity: Family Edition.
• Large Ham:
  • It's almost mandatory for the Card Czar to read certain cards in a hammy manner.
  • Famous hams Nicolas Cage, William Shatner, and Christopher Walken each have a white card.
• Literal Metaphor: For one Black Friday, they sold boxes of bullshit. That is, literal feces from a male bovine.
• Literal Wild Card: This game features blank cards, wherein a player fills said card with whatever prompt they see fit.
• Minimalism: Purely from a design standpoint — the cards are either white with black Helvetica letters, or black with white Helvetica letters. This is to bring the game's focus sharply on the content of the cards themselves, which are frequently anything but minimalist.
• Nobody Poops: Averted in the official rules. Players decide who is the first Card Czar based on who pooped most recently.
• Not Hyperbole: It's common for the company to advertise some sort of weird Black Friday deal, only to reveal that they were absolutely not kidding.
  • For Black Friday 2016, they sold "bullshit." As in, literal feces from a male bovine. People ordered it, not thinking they were serious... only to be grossed out when they saw what they'd purchased.
  • Black Friday 2017 saw the company livestream digging a giant hole. Not doing anything with it, just digging a gigantic hole.
  • In Black Friday 2018, they offered a "99 percent off sale." While they used it to advertise their next expansion for twenty dollars, they also really did sell things at 99 percent off, including a trip to Fiji, a halbred, a ball tossing game, a four-door car, and even money, such as selling a $100 bill for $1. They even had a "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer on their site to say "yes, we are really, honestly selling these things at this cheap price". The catch is that only one person could order each of the 99-percent-off items, leading to an online version of a Retail Riot.
• Official Game Variant: The instructions feature a list of house rules for the players to potentially include, including using Rando Cardrissian as a ghost player or passing your turn so you can discard your hand.
• Precision F-Strike: Despite the general vulgarity of the game, it is not a Cluster F-Bomb and most cards don't have serious profanity on them, except for "Being a motherfucking sorcerer." The Precision F-Strike (along with Noodle Implements and, depending on what black card it's answering, Power Perversion Potential) makes this one of the more popular and likely-to-win cards.
• Pun-Based Title: The title is a pun on "Crimes against humanity".
• Refuge in Audacity: If there is anything that someone will not want to be insulted, it'll be put on a white card so that folks can come up with terrible ways to discuss it.
• Serious Business: This is the name for one of the suggested house rules. It's also an example, in the sense that it adds what some people would consider an unneeded layer of complexity to the game.

  Instead of picking a favorite card each round, the Card Czar ranks the top three in order. The best card gets 3 Awesome Points, the second-best gets 2, and the third gets 1. Keep a running tally of the score, and at the end of the game, the winner is declared the funniest, mathematically speaking.

• Schmuck Bait: The successor to the "Bigger Blacker Box", simply called "Please do not buy this product." It's 69" long, and contains a single card^note . And it's $100.
• Stealth Pun: Some expansion packs contain cards that seem irrelevant to the theme of the pack until you think about it. For example, the Box Expansion contains the white card "Pandora's Vagina", while the Fantasy pack contains the white card "Gender Equality".
• Tabletop Game A.I.: Called "Rando Cardrissian" in this game. Should you choose to have Rando as a "player", "he" gets a pile of cards that only "he" can draw from. Quoth the rules:

  [If Rando] wins the game, all players go home in a state of everlasting shame.

• Take That!:
  • By far, the longest and most intricate descriptions on the white cards belong to horrible actions to be done unto Glenn Beck.
  • The nature of the game means that anything mentioned by a card (black or white) is fair game for players. This, of course, goes without saying.
  • The entire Trump Expansion is about the apocalypse in the wake of Donald Trump winning the 2016 American presidential election, to the point that it came bundled with a survival kit, complete with gas mask, seed packets for restarting civilization, and a gold locket with a picture of Barack Obama. Then they took it a step further and founded a super PAC called the Nuisance Committee dedicated to making fun of Trump and discrediting his presidential campaign. Even the rulebook in the basic set takes a jab at Trump by telling people who have any complaints or legal threats can direct them at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort and it lists the address for it.
  • Following the repeal of Roe v. Wade, they decided to support abortion by donating 100% of their website sales coming from states that banned abortion to the National Network of Abortion Funds. When you are told this, you have the option of just continuing, agreeing and adding in an extra $5 donation, or complaining about it due to not supporting the cause. Choosing that option takes you to another pop-up pointing out that sometimes, bigger and more powerful people like to force their values onto others against their will and proceeds to put in the extra $5 donation anyway.
  • In 2024, they launched a website called Apologize.LOL, in which they agreed to pay up to one hundred dollars to people who didn't vote in the 2020 presidential election to vote in the 2024 election. The catch is that the person in question had to apologize for not voting in 2020, make a voting plan, and post "Donald Trump is a human toilet" on social media. It also included a jab at how easy it was to get voter data about who did and didn't vote, along with a jab at anyone who accussed Cards Against Humanity of getting too political in the website's Q&A section.

    Q: I used to love your card games before you got all political.
    A: Your mom used to love you before you got so fucking stupid.

• Take That, Audience!: For 2016's Black Friday, the creators dug a huge pointless hole for no reason, continuing to enlarge the hole with more donations, eventually amassing over a hundred thousand dollars. One of the FAQs asked why they didn't give this money to a charity, to which they gave the response "Why aren't YOU giving all this money to charity? It's your money."
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: A rare Tabletop Game example. Depending on the cards played and the Card Czar's tastes, some jaw-droppingly violent and/or perverted scenarios can occur.
  • One play, popularized by the web show Table Flip:

    Play: After months of practice with [sexual humiliation], I think I'm finally ready for [my mom].

  • Another, as seen on PewDiePie and Cutie Pie Marzia's Let's Play video:

    Black Card: How did I lose my virginity?
    Marzia's White Card: Bees??

  • Some fan-made card packs go even further.
• Vulgar Humor:
  • Several of the cards have scatological and/or sexual themes that can be disgusting or horrific. This is especially true of many of the third party expansions and the online versions, which crank up the shock value by being as vulgar as possible.
  • The "Bullshit" pack was literally bullshit.

Tropes referenced by card text

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White cards 

Black cards 

Both black and white cards 

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