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Comment by Helloworldboy | Hacker News Reader

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Helloworldboy

How can such a boring game have such a large following?

The gimmick wears out in like 15 minutes.

Edit: these downvotes. To think I pegged HN for a community with good taste in card games.

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This article is not about card games. Would you mind taking another look at the guidelines and then following them?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's less about the game itself and more about the people you're with when you sit down to play it. You get to know what they're squeamish about, what their prejudices are, what they're passionate about, even their fears. They say that many a truth was spoken in jest and giving someone license to say aloud dirty, disgusting, or even downright reprehensible thoughts will get to the core of someone's worldview faster than anything else. Think of it less as a game and more as a communal word-association test.

I've played it several times before with a pretty wide range of people.

Without fail it just devolves into who can put together the edgiest answer. Then after 2 or 3 rounds everyone just comes to expect it and gets bored.

It really depends on the people and the mood, imo. I've played with groups where it's like that but I've also played with groups where the answers were more interesting.

https://youtu.be/ZVOD5D4IArw?t=164

I think you can draw some great parallels between Harvey Danger as a band and Cards Against Humanity as a card game.

Harvey Danger

- 1 successful song

- Edgy and cringey (eg. "and I don't even own a TV", W E W)

CaH

- Fun for 1 hand

- Edgy and cringey

I guess Harvey Danger was bored, because they sure are boring.

It's funny you bring that line up, because a large number of people I know don't actually own TVs, most of them are laptop dwellers and use Netflix, Hulu, or other streaming services to satisfy their media needs. Don't forget that we live in the era of the 'cord-cutter'.

To expand on the original sentiment: experiences are what you make of them.

I think an adversarial game of CAH with you would be interesting.

The Jackbox game series' equivalent to CAH solves this nicely by having you type in your own answers, instead of picking from a pool of premade ones - you can still be "edgy", but you have to make it work in context instead of going for cheap shock.

Personally, I got bored with making sour grapes comments on the internet in like 1995. To each their own.

Yeah, all those dreams I've had of creating a boring card games shattered.

You've really cut me to the core.

What?

Any game that is fun even for 5-10 minutes will ripple through people for years, there is always a new 10,000.

Also they are very good at viral marketing. They have you commenting on the game in a thread on HN about it.

Keep people talking about your game and what you are doing, recipe for success.

The game mechanic is catchy, that is almost all a successful game needs aside from marketing momentum.

My kneejerk response is to downvote you, but I'm bigger than that.

I'll just refer back to IDIC: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.

It might get old for you, but other people enjoy the creativity of combining things in new and interestingly subtle ways.

The problem is that circumstances often compel us to do what is popular. If McDonalds buys out all the restaurants nearby, realistically you will have to eat a big mac if it's late and you don't have time to cook. If Cards Against Humanity is the coolest thing ever and all your co-workers play it every day it's in your interest to play it with them. Popular things bear upon your life whether you want them to or not, so it makes sense to work to get rid of popular things that one doesn't like.

The problem is that even though there's an "infinite" number of combinations, they're all just some form of "edgy"/gross-out humor.

It's just not that interesting after a few hands.

You seem unwaveringly convinced that your opinion of a card game is strongly relevant to a) the article, b) other people.

I don't like the original game, but they did make Secret Hitler, which is fucking awesome!

People in liking different things shocker. More at 11.

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