Shitty board games and Cards Against Humanities Bickering

[Bzalthek]

I like munchkin.  It's up there with monopoly on "games to make mortal enemies" with.  But then when a game drags out I'm one of those players that takes the initiative in making sure someone, ANYONE, wins.  Plus it's a one game maximum kinda game.  You can avoid repeats by keeping tinsel in your pocket for emergency distraction.

[Teleku]

F13 never fails to disappoint.  As with many things here, I've never met a person, EVER, who didn't absolutely love playing CaH when introduced to it.  Or at least was offended by the content.  Except now on F13 (which I guess doesn't count as meeting).

Just..... *head explosion*

Games like Munchkin and Killer Rabbits seem like fast easy fun at first, but as mentioned, they can go on for god damned ever.  Which gets old quick.

[Jeff Kelly]

Munchkin was fun 15 years ago, when that kind of humor wasn't plastered all over the internet. Since you can't surf the web today without tripping over 5 memes and new stuff is discovered, passed around and overexposed until everyone hates it at a record pace, munchin seems kind of lame by comparison. You also need to be one of the demographics the game pokes fun at to really enjoy it. It is not very accessible to people that won't get the jokes/tropes that are being made fun of. It also feels very stale due to its age and the way the internet has assimilated that kind of humor.

CAH is more accessible because you don't need to be a part of any sort of "club" or sociotope to appreciate its humor so anyone can play it. The kind of taboo breaking gameplay is also weirdly accessible to all kinds of people, even those that normally wouldn't play games. In my opinion it suffers from the same general problem Munchin does, it's only fun for a few rounds until the novelty factor wears off and building crass or blue or taboo breaking sentences with the cards stops being exciting. It's pretty much played for the novelty factor and then gets boring fast.

[Paelos]

I'm on the list of people that hate CAH, for reasons that would be better homed in a Politics thread.

I could have predicted that.

Hippy. 

[Bunk]

I fully admit to loving CaH, but for me its one of those games we only break out a couple times a year, usually at gatherings that involve large amounts of booze.

[eldaec]

I'd agree that CAH is more accessible than Munchkin.

But comparing the two is a bit silly, as the point being made is that they are bad examples of completely different genres.

Apples to apples or Dixit, are funnier, more interesting, and more accessible to wider audience than CAH. I'm not sure anyone is saying they find the game offensive in itself,  just that bad players are unnecessarily encouraged to be offensive if they can't be interesting, and there is no real need to play games that do that when there are plenty of examples of much better games based on exactly the same mechanic.

[Samwise]

When I've got a black card in CAH I let everyone know up front that I'll be picking the white card that makes me hesitate before reading it.

[schild]

Neither Dixit nor Apples to Apples is more interesting or funnier than CaH. First of all, those games are only as funny as the people that play them. In a vacuum, there's absolutely no question that CaH is funnier than either of those are those are not funny in a vacuum. At all. They require context and effort to be funny. CaH does not require context or effort, but is enhanced when funny people play it. Second of all, accessible to a wider audience? Correct, you can't play CaH with children, the unfunny, or excessively old and obsolete. What a tragedy. I won't be taking CaH to my local old folks home on children's visiting day.

[Thrawn]

It's always interesting to see how widely opinions vary.  Apples to Apples is my other game along with Munchkin that I will pretty much flat out refuse to play.  I don't enjoy anything about it, just throw a random card in, pick a random card from the pile, read the possibly mildly entertaining result and you're now playing Apples to Apples.

[schild]

just throw a random card in, pick a random card from the pile, read the possibly mildly entertaining result and you're now playing Apples to Apples.

But you aren't offending anyone! It's a giant pile of nothing but non-trigger words! SafeForTumblr™

[Slyfeind]

Munchkin is indeed a dull game system that lives and dies on the cleverness (or lack thereof) of the references. My group really gets our Munchkin kicks by combining expansion packs (space pirates, zombie Conan, etc). I definitely prefer it to CaH, which to me is fun for a round or two and then I'm kinda done. I'll keep playing if that's what everyone wants to play, and I'm not against it by any means, but there are only so many George Clooney Big Bird porn jokes I can force myself to laugh at each week.

[Thrawn]

Or people could play good games that aren't Munckin, or Apples, or CaH, but we already have an entire thread for that. 

[schild]

The more offensive CaH cards make great tokens for Magic.

[Paelos]

Play CAH with a random dummy hand if you haven't. That can have some fun results. It also makes a fun drinking game.

If your card doesn't get picked you drink. If the dummy hand beats everyone, you all have to finish your drink.

[Thrawn]

If having a random hand improves the game wouldn't it be even better if you just randomly picked and read cards while people drank until they got bored?  You can skip the "game" completely!

[Paelos]

It's not really a game at all. It's an experience. Like Mad Libs. 

[Phildo]

Funny how before this thread, I've never heard a bad thing about Munchkin.  Meanwhile, I've also never heard anyone complain about Cards Against Humanity unless they were offended by the humor.  Plus, CaH gives out fantastic holiday presents.  You guys can argue all day, I'll be on my square foot of Hawaii 2 sipping margaritas.

[Pezzle]

Hi neighbor!

[Yegolev]

Prior to playing the Adventure Time variant of Munchkin with my son, my experience with it was using Munchkin Cthulu as something to clear our heads of Arkham Horror.

Card Wars is a better game, really.

[schild]

And Card Wars is terrible.

[Phildo]

Also, CaH comes out with expansion packs fairly regularly so that the game doesn't get stale.  I got something like 30 new cards just from the holiday promotion, on top of island real estate, three packets of magic berries, a booklet of hate mail they received and a list of the financial contributions to Mitch McConnell.

[schild]

Also, CaH comes out with expansion packs fairly regularly so that the game doesn't get stale.  I got something like 30 new cards just from the holiday promotion, on top of island real estate, three packets of magic berries, a booklet of hate mail they received and a list of the financial contributions to Mitch McConnell.

Yea, well, they made someone uncomfortable with a rape joke once, sooooooooooooooo just like whatever, man.

[Sky]

What could possibly be wrong with cards against humanity? Seriously.

About 1/3 of it goes over my redneck neighbor's heads. So you have to play to whoever the judge is, but I still never win because I just play for my own amusement anyway. Their daughter is a bit twisted, but she's still naive and nice enough to not get the really dark ones. And I do admit I have a meta game, trying to guess how many hands before one neighbor gets too drunk and confused and quits.

[Phildo]

Yea, well, they made someone uncomfortable with a rape joke once, sooooooooooooooo just like whatever, man.

Weeeeell, one of the cards IS "Surprise Sex".

Also, the last time I played, I had a hand consisting of the following cards: "White People", "Black People" and "The Jews".  Two of them won me hands, can you guess which?

[schild]

White people don't win anything.

[Sky]

They win everything!

[IainC]

Munchkin is shit. Most of my roleplaying friends however think it's hilarious and have all the expansions so insist on cracking it out at any opportunity. John Kovalic is a nice guy and I like his art generally but I give him a hard time about beating the Munchkin horse every time I bump into him.

[schild]

Kovalic sucks. Not as much as the Foglios, but he's pretty much in a class of his own shit.

The real problem is Steve Jackson. Their money maker happens to be trash. Bleh.

[Trippy]

Yeah but it pays for everything else they do.

[schild]

I'm aware. Everything else they do is pretty shit also. So I guess the King of Shit Mountain funding the rest makes sense.

I really don't like SJG.

[Hawkbit]

Zombie Dice was fun-ish while working towards getting sloshed.  Until we played King of Tokyo, then we never played Zombie Dice again. 

That's all I got for SJG though.

[Sky]

Car Wars was fun in the 80s.

The Foglios? There's more of them now? I hated Phil Foglio's crap in Dragon.

[jakonovski]

I like Talisman. You don't have to do anything in it except throw a dice or three. That is its greatest virtue, especially after playing a lengthy Descent campaign where people ocd for hours over moves because who the fuck caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaares.

[Nevermore]

The only thing I knew from SJG was GURPS.

[Goldenmean]

American gaming probably wouldn't be what it was today without SJG, and I feel that they deserve some (waning) measure of respect for that. Some of my first memories of hobby board gaming are their pocket box games from the early 80s, and my friends and I played the hell out of Car Wars, Illuminati, Ogre, and Hacker in junior high and high school, but they've gone incredibly stagnant in the last decade with basically nothing but endless iterations on Munchkin, and the occasional kickstarter attempt to relive their glory days with a deluxe version of one of their classics. Fantasy Flight has completely ousted them as the kings of ameritrash.

And there have always been 2 Foglios since... man, at least the mid 90s. Phil and his wife Kaja.