Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2012-09-23 05:00 am
azurelunatic) wrote2012-09-23 05:00 am
Cards Against All Semblance of Sensibility
This seems to have been going around, but I have a copy of Cards Against Humanity and its first expansion pack. I also have what appears to be the main edition of Apples to Apples.
The rules of both games are pretty much the same. They are games of analogy, description, or fill-in-the-blank, played with two decks: a source deck (black in Cards Against Humanity, green in Apples to Apples) and a target deck (white in Cards Against Humanity, red in Apples to Apples). Players take turns drawing a source card, and the rest of the players choose the target card from their hands that they feel best fits the source. The submissions are judged anonymously, though sometimes you can just tell who played what. "Best" is a very relative description, as the judge of "best" is the player holding the card from the source deck. It may in practice actually be the least similar, or the most hilariously wrong.
vass has been compiling a list of cards for Cards Against Fandom, which ought to be great fun; I'm planning to include no few of those in my local decks.
Since the games are similar enough, I decided that the best idea ever would be to expand the hilarity by joining them. I suspect that there are a few cards that won't work particularly well together, but those can probably be just juggled in the normal course of play. I have high hopes.
Cards Against Humanity was written by horrible people from the internet. It will never be a nice game, but there's a difference between a horrible party game that my terrible friends will have awful amounts of fun playing, and a horrible party game that's terrible enough to make my friends feel awful and end the party early. I found things in the deck that would jolt me out of a party mood. I suspect that each of my friends is going to have a slightly different list of dealbreaker cards, in a way that means that I may well go through and weed out cards that I don't personally want to see in play, but I may well miss one that someone else would glitch on.
After contemplating and discarding some potential solutions, I hit upon an idea that I think will work. I was reading Twitter and something about the TSA came up, so I decided that the appropriate concept is opt-out. Don't want to play a card because it's horrible (in a 10-foot pole way, not a hard-to-play way)? Opt-out! Dump the card in the opt-out bin. (This can be done discreetly, or with fanfare, depending on the circumstances. If with fanfare, the player should loudly declare, "Opt-Out!") When a player declares an opt-out, they are subject to hand scanning. This means that they display their hand to the other players, then they discard half of them and draw replacements.
After the game finishes, I'll examine the opt-out bin. Cards that I think actually shouldn't be in play at all will go away. Cards that remain in the game will get a tally mark, to track that they've been opted out before, for future review if it keeps happening.
I have decided that the unholy combination of Cards Against Humanity and Apples to Apples should be dubbed Caramel Onions.
Caramelized onions, where sweet onions are gently fried until they turn golden-brown, stop smelling of pain, and start smelling of delicious, are one of the world's great culinary blessings, and remind me that there is grace in the world however much various bits of it may be making me yell at any given instant.
Caramel onions, the Halloween prank, are a Horrible People On The Internet thing. The method is the same as making a caramel apple, except substituting a horrible onion of pain for the sweet juicy apple. It combines the concept of apples with complete and wrong horror, which is exactly what the combined card games do.
I can't wait to play.
The rules of both games are pretty much the same. They are games of analogy, description, or fill-in-the-blank, played with two decks: a source deck (black in Cards Against Humanity, green in Apples to Apples) and a target deck (white in Cards Against Humanity, red in Apples to Apples). Players take turns drawing a source card, and the rest of the players choose the target card from their hands that they feel best fits the source. The submissions are judged anonymously, though sometimes you can just tell who played what. "Best" is a very relative description, as the judge of "best" is the player holding the card from the source deck. It may in practice actually be the least similar, or the most hilariously wrong.
vass has been compiling a list of cards for Cards Against Fandom, which ought to be great fun; I'm planning to include no few of those in my local decks. Since the games are similar enough, I decided that the best idea ever would be to expand the hilarity by joining them. I suspect that there are a few cards that won't work particularly well together, but those can probably be just juggled in the normal course of play. I have high hopes.
Cards Against Humanity was written by horrible people from the internet. It will never be a nice game, but there's a difference between a horrible party game that my terrible friends will have awful amounts of fun playing, and a horrible party game that's terrible enough to make my friends feel awful and end the party early. I found things in the deck that would jolt me out of a party mood. I suspect that each of my friends is going to have a slightly different list of dealbreaker cards, in a way that means that I may well go through and weed out cards that I don't personally want to see in play, but I may well miss one that someone else would glitch on.
After contemplating and discarding some potential solutions, I hit upon an idea that I think will work. I was reading Twitter and something about the TSA came up, so I decided that the appropriate concept is opt-out. Don't want to play a card because it's horrible (in a 10-foot pole way, not a hard-to-play way)? Opt-out! Dump the card in the opt-out bin. (This can be done discreetly, or with fanfare, depending on the circumstances. If with fanfare, the player should loudly declare, "Opt-Out!") When a player declares an opt-out, they are subject to hand scanning. This means that they display their hand to the other players, then they discard half of them and draw replacements.
After the game finishes, I'll examine the opt-out bin. Cards that I think actually shouldn't be in play at all will go away. Cards that remain in the game will get a tally mark, to track that they've been opted out before, for future review if it keeps happening.
I have decided that the unholy combination of Cards Against Humanity and Apples to Apples should be dubbed Caramel Onions.
Caramelized onions, where sweet onions are gently fried until they turn golden-brown, stop smelling of pain, and start smelling of delicious, are one of the world's great culinary blessings, and remind me that there is grace in the world however much various bits of it may be making me yell at any given instant.
Caramel onions, the Halloween prank, are a Horrible People On The Internet thing. The method is the same as making a caramel apple, except substituting a horrible onion of pain for the sweet juicy apple. It combines the concept of apples with complete and wrong horror, which is exactly what the combined card games do.
I can't wait to play.
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So the opt out rule and preemptive X-Ray of the contents is a great idea. Thanks.
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