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Cards Against Humanity is now made in the United States of America.

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We’re officially moved in to the new office!

Cards Against Humanity rented this old pharmacy in Logan Square and turned it into a coworking space for ourselves and some really cool people here in Chicago.

We’ve had a busy four months of construction, redesigned the interior of the space, and even designed our own furniture with materials we salvaged from the original interior.

Our friend KC made these amazing custom window treatments for us, and me, Jana, and Brent painted and decorated the space.

There’s eight amazing people working here, mostly on projects they began on Kickstarter:

We’ve also opened up one desk as a kind of residency - every three months, we’ll invite a really cool person to come in and work on a new project with us, and we’ll cover their rent. We’re really happy to have Mike Boxleiter of Mikengreg here now, working on a new game. 

Me and Rob Loukotka have also rented an art studio next door (I’ll post pictures of the studio soon) - he’s working on his ACME prints and building out a wood shop and I’m working on a screen printing studio.

This whole space is one of the my favorite things that I’ve ever made, and it’s totally already worth it, because now I get to work with these incredible people every day.

There’s already some really cool things happening at the office (last night Shawnimals were here working with us on a secret new project; right now Ryan from The Men Who Wear Many Hats is here working on Organ Trail), and I’m looking forward to tons of game nights and talks and all kinds of amazing things in the future.

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fattehboi:

I made these 40 mins before the counter-protest [at Vassar]. Trust me I know they’re sloppy, but the idea came to me when I was in class so I didn’t have much time.

fattehboi:

I made these 40 mins before the counter-protest [at Vassar]. Trust me I know they’re sloppy, but the idea came to me when I was in class so I didn’t have much time.

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Washington Post Style section, but they also said was Louis CK “out” so what do they know.

Washington Post Style section, but they also said was Louis CK “out” so what do they know.

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The year in tweets

I spent a lot of 2012 traveling, and Twitter helped me meet new people and stay in touch with my friends. Here’s some memories of my year on Twitter, and my favorite tweets of the year.

Read More

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The Guardian:




Crass party game Cards Against Humanity can now count Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales as one of its most fervent fans after the makers donated all $70,000 of their holiday profits to the Wikimedia Foundation.
The “free party game for horrible people” has grown its cult following based on its cental conceit: that the more taboo, politically incorrect or downright vile your answer to a question is, the more hilarious and consequently higher score.
A game founded in such base instincts and distributed free on the internet might seem an unlikely source of charity, but when it came to issuing a special holiday edition, the game’s creators, decided to do something both creative and public-spirited.
They offered the the pack of festive themed cards at whatever price people were willing to pay, without saying the profits would go to charity.
Max Temkin, co-creator of Cards Against Humanity said they came up with the pay-what-you-want packs as a way to build up excitement for the game and to experiment with payment models.
In two days, they sold most of their approximately 85,000 holiday expansion packs with people paying an average of $3.89. The majority of people paid $5 and 19.79% didn’t pay anything.
“From the outset we decided we wanted to give all the proceeds to charity and that made it more fun for us,” said Temkin. “We weren’t really worried about the bottom line, we were really able to do it as an experiment and do it in a great way.”
After covering an assortment of costs including manufacturing, shipping and development they were left with $70,066.27 in profit, of which every cent was paid to the Wikimedia Foundation.
“We wanted to pick something we thought the users of our game of had heard of and believed in and used and we felt like Wikipedia is pretty unique in terms of having universal appeal,” said Temkin. “It’s something that helps a lot of people of all different classes and levels of education in different places all around the world … We also support the social mission of Wikipedia.”
Or, in Cards Against Humanity language: “Wikipedia is very important to us because without it we would not have known the exact volume of a dose of fresh boar sperm or graduated college.”
To play the game, the “card czar” picks one of the black question cards and the other players draw from their decks of 10 answer cards to produce a response. The best response wins an “awesome point”.
So when someone draws the card, “What gets better with age?” some of the potential game-supplied replies include: women in yogurt commercials, waking up half-naked in a Denny’s parking lot, serfdom, the shambling corpse of Larry King, Harry Potter erotica and the token minority.
Those are some of the more repeatable answers.
An on-site infographic shows that the money could have went towards buying Little Monkey Caye island in Belize, 28,000 packets of astronaut ice cream or 1,000 liters of fresh boar sperm. Instead, they chose to donate it to the company who told them the exact volume of a dose of fresh boar sperm.
And Wikimedia Foundation founder Jimmy Wales is pretty excited about the results: “OMG this is so fucking cool. Scroll to the bottom. Cards against Humanity, you are the best.”
“I can’t even tell you how we were freaking out yesterday when he tweeted about us,” Temkin said. “$70,000 is a lot for a game like us, but it’s still pretty small, we weren’t sure it would move the needle for Wikipedia or not, so it was really cool to hear from him.”
Temkin also said that they received emails from Wikimedia workers thanking them for the donation.
Cards Against Humanity was envisioned by eight friends from Illinois and has grown to acquire cult popularity. On Tuesday, it was the best selling Toys and Games product on Amazon, where it regularly sells out.
It costs $25, but it is also available as a free download under a Creative Commons license, which means people can’t legally sell it, but they can print a copy of the game on their own.
The business strategy of putting the product directly in the hands of consumers follows the company’s self-starter ethos.
The game became a success on the online fundraising site Kickstarter, where the game met its fundraising goal of $4,000 nearly four times over in January 2011.

The Guardian:

Crass party game Cards Against Humanity can now count Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales as one of its most fervent fans after the makers donated all $70,000 of their holiday profits to the Wikimedia Foundation.

The “free party game for horrible people” has grown its cult following based on its cental conceit: that the more taboo, politically incorrect or downright vile your answer to a question is, the more hilarious and consequently higher score.

A game founded in such base instincts and distributed free on the internet might seem an unlikely source of charity, but when it came to issuing a special holiday edition, the game’s creators, decided to do something both creative and public-spirited.

They offered the the pack of festive themed cards at whatever price people were willing to pay, without saying the profits would go to charity.

Max Temkin, co-creator of Cards Against Humanity said they came up with the pay-what-you-want packs as a way to build up excitement for the game and to experiment with payment models.

In two days, they sold most of their approximately 85,000 holiday expansion packs with people paying an average of $3.89. The majority of people paid $5 and 19.79% didn’t pay anything.

“From the outset we decided we wanted to give all the proceeds to charity and that made it more fun for us,” said Temkin. “We weren’t really worried about the bottom line, we were really able to do it as an experiment and do it in a great way.”

After covering an assortment of costs including manufacturing, shipping and development they were left with $70,066.27 in profit, of which every cent was paid to the Wikimedia Foundation.

“We wanted to pick something we thought the users of our game of had heard of and believed in and used and we felt like Wikipedia is pretty unique in terms of having universal appeal,” said Temkin. “It’s something that helps a lot of people of all different classes and levels of education in different places all around the world … We also support the social mission of Wikipedia.”

Or, in Cards Against Humanity language: “Wikipedia is very important to us because without it we would not have known the exact volume of a dose of fresh boar sperm or graduated college.”

To play the game, the “card czar” picks one of the black question cards and the other players draw from their decks of 10 answer cards to produce a response. The best response wins an “awesome point”.

So when someone draws the card, “What gets better with age?” some of the potential game-supplied replies include: women in yogurt commercials, waking up half-naked in a Denny’s parking lot, serfdom, the shambling corpse of Larry King, Harry Potter erotica and the token minority.

Those are some of the more repeatable answers.

An on-site infographic shows that the money could have went towards buying Little Monkey Caye island in Belize, 28,000 packets of astronaut ice cream or 1,000 liters of fresh boar sperm. Instead, they chose to donate it to the company who told them the exact volume of a dose of fresh boar sperm.

And Wikimedia Foundation founder Jimmy Wales is pretty excited about the results: “OMG this is so fucking cool. Scroll to the bottom. Cards against Humanity, you are the best.”

“I can’t even tell you how we were freaking out yesterday when he tweeted about us,” Temkin said. “$70,000 is a lot for a game like us, but it’s still pretty small, we weren’t sure it would move the needle for Wikipedia or not, so it was really cool to hear from him.”

Temkin also said that they received emails from Wikimedia workers thanking them for the donation.

Cards Against Humanity was envisioned by eight friends from Illinois and has grown to acquire cult popularity. On Tuesday, it was the best selling Toys and Games product on Amazon, where it regularly sells out.

It costs $25, but it is also available as a free download under a Creative Commons license, which means people can’t legally sell it, but they can print a copy of the game on their own.

The business strategy of putting the product directly in the hands of consumers follows the company’s self-starter ethos.

The game became a success on the online fundraising site Kickstarter, where the game met its fundraising goal of $4,000 nearly four times over in January 2011.

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Big Cards Against Humanity announcement: See how our pay-what-you-want holiday packs did and how we spent the money.

I’m so proud of everything about this. Cards Against Humanity is the most fun project I’ve ever worked on.

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Here come the Cards Against Humanity holiday packs.

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This is my life now.

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21

Cards Against Humanity finally nailed down the legal paperwork with CBS to make our Giant Bomb expansion pack. Here’s how I sent it over, and here’s the video of the unboxing.

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A Good Game of Cards by The Doubleclicks

Here’s the official Cards Against Humanity theme song, written by our friends The Doubleclicks for the Cards Against Humanity PAX panel. It’s ridiculously, insanely catchy, and a free, DRM-free download at CardsAgainstHumanity.com.

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GameChurch:

Cards Against Humanity is unique in that it is wholly about ideas and their implicit power. Its stark black and white design gives the game a decidedly neutral stance toward any of the ideas that may exist on its cards. White privilege, Harry Potter erotica, Kanye West, and God are all given equal treatment, which is to say that the players are given complete control over their treatment. It’s as if we were given a list of everything in the world and instructed to sort through them, casting judgment or offering praises respectively.

But the questions we answer with those items frame these judgments for us. More often than not, those questions setup opportunities for honest and unabashed reflection on our humanity: “What would grandma find disturbing, yet oddly charming?” “What did the U.S. airdrop to the children of Afghanistan?” “Daddy, why is mommy crying?” These are brutal questions with even more brutal possible answers: “Rehab,” or “Brown People,” or “The Glass Ceiling.”

The game causes us to sit back and think about that for a moment. All of a sudden we’re thinking about the timeless nature of gender discrimination or racism. We’re acknowledging the genuine life-altering pain that comes as a result of drug abuse or broken families. Oh, and we’re laughing a lot too.

That last part there, that’s the part that really makes us uncomfortable, right? That we’d be considering such deeply serious and tragic things while laughing and having a good time seems wrong.

Cards Against Humanity, a self-dubbed “party game for horrible people,” appeals to those who are honest with themselves about the nature of their own world and their own soul. We are horrifically imperfect people, and the problems are so big and seemingly insurmountable that when placed before us in unavoidable black and white letters, the only response that makes any practical sense is to laugh at the absurdity of it all. At least, for tonight.

Still, tomorrow we won’t be laughing. Then what, I wonder?

I would not have guessed that a Christian gaming site would produce my favorite review of Cards Against Humanity.

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Andy told us to “do something neat” for our booth at XOXO, so we got a bunch of snakes and an alligator.

Andy told us to “do something neat” for our booth at XOXO, so we got a bunch of snakes and an alligator.

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