I gave CAH (and expansion packs) as stocking stuffers for xmas and they were extremely well received.
What they say on the tin is true -- you feel like a horrible person when you play the game, which is extremely cathartic.
Hell, they even did a pay what you want for a small package of Christmas themed cards and pretty sure they pulled a 70k profit from that maneuver, despite ~25% percent paying $0.
Their average credit card fee was $0.43 per transaction. Ouch!
Salaries and Wages 7,468,743
Outside Contract Services 1,791,275
Internet Hosting 1,309,591
Other Operating Expenses 1,010,273
Bank Fees 945,190
That is not the cost structure I expected. I thought the balance would be more on Internet Hosting. What are those ~10 million of salaries, contracts and other operating expenses? Besides, their expenses were 15 million and income 30 million, do they need more money?
Wikimedia employs a lot of people, I personally do not donate because I believe they employ way too many. Also pretty much all costs are already covered by corporate sponsors like Google.
I'm an American Express cardholder and spend several hundred thousand dollars a year. If you're a small business, startup, someone I like, whatever, I go out of my way to pay you money with Dwolla or a debit card because of the fees. I'll even overnight a check if its a significant amount and I trust you.
If you manage to get a copy of Apples to Apples, Disney Edition (not sure if that's the real title) then you can play the mashup I was exposed to several weeks ago: Cards Against Disney. Everyone has a hand with cards from both games; a prompt is drawn from one game and answered with cards from the other game, alternating each turn. Much silliness ensues.
Disney's copyright lobbying suggests that your bitterness is completely appropriate. Ever wonder why the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 was nicknamed the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act"?
When I was young, I liked to mix the questions and answers from different Trivial Pursuit cards. A kind of surreal "Trivial Pursuit: Exquisite Corpse Edition." :)
I was first introduced to this as Thousand White Cards Against Humanity, wherein instead of drawing from the deck or playing a card, you could take a blank and write in a new card. Compared to that, the boxed version just seems crass and unimaginative.
On the other hand, I'm normally the one to introduce groups to Apples To Apples. Those who claim this more tame version of the concept isn't fun are missing the real joy - how a limited set of choices forces surreality, playing for the person, and twisted readings of the cards.
Of course, if you're playing any of these as straight-up "this one wins", you are missing the incredible joy of "hamburgers smell, but only the bad ones are fragrant. Hilter probably was fragrant, but I doubt anyone lived to tell the tale. My birthday, however, boy was that fragrant...". The verdict slow-descriptive-reveal as the judge is the real art, and where you learn the most about people
I had this mostly written up, so I'm going to say pretty much what my sibling said in a different way :)
It's not about the ruleset so much as the players' attitudes.
There's a way to play Apples to Apples that's as a card game. You deal the cards, flip a topic, everyone puts up, the judge reveals the cards and picks a winner. It's pretty boring unless the cards themselves are hilariously lewd, hence CAH. (And I've played rounds of CAH this way that were just as boring.)
There's another way to play it, more like a role-playing game with the cards as a prop. The judging is a discursive experience played with the whole group. When the cards are revealed, due attention must be given to each one. "Fuzzy like teenagers. Fuzzy like... The Clinton administration? Fuzzy like herding cats, okay. Fuzzy like... Dinosaurs." Once all the cards are on the table, the judging begins. Unlike in the card game version, the cards which aren't relevant must be dealt with explicitly, and audience participation is encouraged.
"Dinosaurs just aren't fuzzy."
"What about pterodactyls?"
"Yeah, birds are technically dinosaurs."
"Okay, but birds aren't fuzzy, they're fluffy."
"Maybe it's fuzzy on the inside. Like dinosaurs have nice personalities."
If I'm hawking my own card, that's minus points. Or is that not my card, and I'm trying to sandbag it with praise? Complex interpersonal dynamics meet linguistics as every judge's turn becomes a little game to itself. And just wait until cards start to turn up that tie into previous rounds...
It requires the players be engaged and committed to playing with each other, rather than with the cards, but it's hopefully obvious how that's fun in a way that has little or nothing to do with the content of the cards themselves. So nothing against CAH or other forks, but people who think CAH is fun where A2A isn't probably don't understand what makes the concept fun in the first place.
The thousand blank white cards version is pretty obvious from my description, although I should add that you can do this for question cards, and you can specify that players have to play more than one card.
As for the advanced judging concept, it is exactly the same as the original, right up until the judge makes a decision:
1. Judge plays the question card. They can do this however they like
2. players pick and play a card in secret from their hand, placing it face-down
3. Judge shuffles the pile a little, to make sure they don't know who played what
4. Judge views the cards
Original Apples to apples rules strict reading:
5. Judge reveals all the cards played
6. Judge announces that one is the winner
7. player who played it gets the question card as a point
Theatrical version:
The judge, in any order they like, describes why some cards are discarded, and others stay in the running:
A: ' "My first car" and "football" are weak compared to "cheese" and "the French revolution" '
B: 'I hated "My First car", so it's not that one!'
C: 'Hah, you canny bastard who played this, I can never resist "cheese" ' [1]
C: ' ewwwwww, not that kind of "cheese" pulls disgusted face ' other players laugh. One groans. Another doesn't get it
The game is about words, descriptions, and events. To just say the word on the card seems... so out of character?
(Plus, the original box art featured a greek/roman character, so pretend you're a philosopher if you like, or a mad emperor :P)
[1] The actual classic amongst my friends is any that are physics related, due to being post-grads
It's not often discussed, but 20% of Kickstarter's top 20 projects are board games. The Pebble and Ouya skew the average, but D&D style games with little plastic figurines clean up with multiple games clearing $2MM or more.
Kickstarter is a huge topic on BoardgameGeek.com. It's everywhere, and tends to dominate the discussions of new titles. It's all over the site, but the concentrated discussion is here:
The success of Cards Against Humanity is evidence of massive demand, and yet all they have protecting them is their brand—unlike, say, craigslist, whose unwillingness to innovate is legendary but whose business benefits from massive network effects. As a result, the (apparent) apathy of the Cards Against Humanity founders offers an opportunity: copy their basic idea, for which they have no protection, and structure your new venture as a real business with full-time efforts devoted to growing sales. You could even one-up them by dropping the non-commercial clause in the Creative Commons license, allowing potential partners to profit and thereby grow your brand further.
The Cards Against Humanity guys are leaving money on the table. Who's going to pick it up?
I wonder, would this get rejected at the iOS App Store on grounds of taste or something? (That's aside from the fact it'd probably be DMCAed away if someone did it.)
We're doing the same thing. Our team is located in NYC, London, and Aurora, IL.
We launched our little meta-board gaming company at http://susd.pretend-money.com a little over 1.5 months ago. And we're already profitable!
We made a conscious decision to forego taking money from advertisers/investors, and even dodged a pre-launch acquihire offer, in an attempt to create something that's 100% our vision (unless YC wanted to fund us.) Our plan is to grow slowly, keep up the quality, and use the money that we're making from the show/blog/podcast to fund even more ambitious community/tech projects.
AND!
Board Games are Big Business!
Board/card/traditional gaming (whatever you want to call it) has been exploding in America over the last 10 years or so. It taps into that primal need for people to sit around together and ACTUALLY interact with each other.
We don't make board games, we're just wildly passionate about them. Paul & Quinns started Shut Up & Sit Down so they could have fun reviewing and writing about board games. They just had a hard time figuring out how to make it sustainable.
I've been playing with technology surrounding gaming for the last three years or so(and gaming since I was little) so it was natural for us all to team up and build something together.
I absolutely love Shut Up and Sit Down, I followed Quinns over from Rock Paper Shotgun and have enjoyed the videos very much since. I'm very happy to hear you're profitable already.
We're "profitable". We're really happy with how the new site turned out. Having enough to keep the lights on an pay some friends to help out with the writing after only a month is a huge accomplishment.
I'm pretty curious about MoD too! We'll see what happens.
This is awesome, but not creating a corporate structure at all and just letting who does and gets what go organically is a really bad idea. It's nice that it's worked for them so far, but if they continue to succeed -- and I hope they do, I love what they've done -- they're very likely to find out that money does matter and does change things.
Readit News
What they say on the tin is true -- you feel like a horrible person when you play the game, which is extremely cathartic.
Hell, they even did a pay what you want for a small package of Christmas themed cards and pretty sure they pulled a 70k profit from that maneuver, despite ~25% percent paying $0.
Their average credit card fee was $0.43 per transaction. Ouch!
http://www.cardsagainsthumanity.com/holidaystats/
I thought you were quoting the accounts of Cards Against Humanity - 1mm usd on Internet hosting seemed a bit much.
This also makes me wonder what kind of deal Costco have... Since i doubt they bend to those things easily.
https://twitter.com/MaxTemkin/status/335124440469876737
Dead Comment
I'd suggest calling it "Disney against Humanity" - but then again I used to work in animation, maybe I'm bitter.
On the other hand, I'm normally the one to introduce groups to Apples To Apples. Those who claim this more tame version of the concept isn't fun are missing the real joy - how a limited set of choices forces surreality, playing for the person, and twisted readings of the cards.
Of course, if you're playing any of these as straight-up "this one wins", you are missing the incredible joy of "hamburgers smell, but only the bad ones are fragrant. Hilter probably was fragrant, but I doubt anyone lived to tell the tale. My birthday, however, boy was that fragrant...". The verdict slow-descriptive-reveal as the judge is the real art, and where you learn the most about people
It's not about the ruleset so much as the players' attitudes.
There's a way to play Apples to Apples that's as a card game. You deal the cards, flip a topic, everyone puts up, the judge reveals the cards and picks a winner. It's pretty boring unless the cards themselves are hilariously lewd, hence CAH. (And I've played rounds of CAH this way that were just as boring.)
There's another way to play it, more like a role-playing game with the cards as a prop. The judging is a discursive experience played with the whole group. When the cards are revealed, due attention must be given to each one. "Fuzzy like teenagers. Fuzzy like... The Clinton administration? Fuzzy like herding cats, okay. Fuzzy like... Dinosaurs." Once all the cards are on the table, the judging begins. Unlike in the card game version, the cards which aren't relevant must be dealt with explicitly, and audience participation is encouraged.
"Dinosaurs just aren't fuzzy."
"What about pterodactyls?"
"Yeah, birds are technically dinosaurs."
"Okay, but birds aren't fuzzy, they're fluffy."
"Maybe it's fuzzy on the inside. Like dinosaurs have nice personalities."
If I'm hawking my own card, that's minus points. Or is that not my card, and I'm trying to sandbag it with praise? Complex interpersonal dynamics meet linguistics as every judge's turn becomes a little game to itself. And just wait until cards start to turn up that tie into previous rounds...
It requires the players be engaged and committed to playing with each other, rather than with the cards, but it's hopefully obvious how that's fun in a way that has little or nothing to do with the content of the cards themselves. So nothing against CAH or other forks, but people who think CAH is fun where A2A isn't probably don't understand what makes the concept fun in the first place.
As for the advanced judging concept, it is exactly the same as the original, right up until the judge makes a decision:
1. Judge plays the question card. They can do this however they like
2. players pick and play a card in secret from their hand, placing it face-down
3. Judge shuffles the pile a little, to make sure they don't know who played what
4. Judge views the cards
Original Apples to apples rules strict reading:
5. Judge reveals all the cards played
6. Judge announces that one is the winner
7. player who played it gets the question card as a point
Theatrical version:
The judge, in any order they like, describes why some cards are discarded, and others stay in the running:
A: ' "My first car" and "football" are weak compared to "cheese" and "the French revolution" '
B: 'I hated "My First car", so it's not that one!'
C: 'Hah, you canny bastard who played this, I can never resist "cheese" ' [1]
C: ' ewwwwww, not that kind of "cheese" pulls disgusted face ' other players laugh. One groans. Another doesn't get it
The game is about words, descriptions, and events. To just say the word on the card seems... so out of character? (Plus, the original box art featured a greek/roman character, so pretend you're a philosopher if you like, or a mad emperor :P)
[1] The actual classic amongst my friends is any that are physics related, due to being post-grads
http://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2013/05/15415-ranked-31-mill...
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/forum/915012/kickstarter/genera...
The Cards Against Humanity guys are leaving money on the table. Who's going to pick it up?
http://www.redactedonline.com
Not to mention it is illegal or near illegal in a lot of locations (e.g. UK).
We launched our little meta-board gaming company at http://susd.pretend-money.com a little over 1.5 months ago. And we're already profitable!
We made a conscious decision to forego taking money from advertisers/investors, and even dodged a pre-launch acquihire offer, in an attempt to create something that's 100% our vision (unless YC wanted to fund us.) Our plan is to grow slowly, keep up the quality, and use the money that we're making from the show/blog/podcast to fund even more ambitious community/tech projects.
AND!
Board Games are Big Business!
Board/card/traditional gaming (whatever you want to call it) has been exploding in America over the last 10 years or so. It taps into that primal need for people to sit around together and ACTUALLY interact with each other.
We're in a bit of a "Golden Age of Board Gaming". Quinns gave a hilarious talk on the subject: http://susd.pretend-money.com/videos/v/board-game-golden-age...
I'm just trying to figure out if you guys make them or just talk about them. :) Either way, a lot of great content on there.
I've been playing with technology surrounding gaming for the last three years or so(and gaming since I was little) so it was natural for us all to team up and build something together.
I would love to see what the Quinns and Paul think of Machine Of Death, a similarly mega-funded card game Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1234131468/machine-of-de...) when it arrives.
We're "profitable". We're really happy with how the new site turned out. Having enough to keep the lights on an pay some friends to help out with the writing after only a month is a huge accomplishment.
I'm pretty curious about MoD too! We'll see what happens.