Another year comes to close, and it has been another lucrative year for the team at Cards Against Humanity. They've released quite a bit of new content. At PAX East, they released a few new booster packs. At PAX Prime, they released their fifth expansion. And with Christmas passed, their new holiday expansion is now complete, too.
I'm back in the states for Christmas, and I'm able to catch up with the recent (and one not-so-recent) expansions of the game.
The Reject Pack is an illusive booster pack of cards featuring some of the cut ideas for the original release of the game. Not too long after the original release of the game, they began giving these out at various events, and giving them out as they fixed printing mistakes in their games. They've never officially sold them, or even acknowledged their existence.
As I mentioned in that PAX East post, some company on amazon listed Reject Packs for $10. Whether they were bootleg or not, that is absolutely the cheapest I have ever seen them offered online. I quickly bought one, and this is the result:
The cards look pretty damn good. The card titles match what has been posted online. I can't really say if the portraits and the reject icon are correct, but they're close enough for me.
The card quality seems slightly cheaper than the cards offered in the fifth expansion, but the cards have the correct pressing texture. Perhaps the quality is slightly lower because these were printed alongside the first versions of the game before the company was highly profitable?
I can't really say whether these are fake one way or the other. They didn't come from CAH official, but there are no obvious flaws. For me, though, they are certainly good enough to cross off my check-list. :)
More and more cards. During PAX Prime, they officially released their fifth expansion. A month later, Crabs released their fourth expansion.
Between these two expansions, you can observe the gap of humor between the official card writers at CAH, and the Crabs writers. SO many of the Crabs cards are specific references. Those kind of references you might find in an episode of Family Guy. As if those kind of references are jokes in of themselves. "Ze Germans"? Oh yeah, I remember that from Snatch. "www.clownpenis.fart"? A reference to a hilarious SNL sketch, but not funny on its own. The very last card in the expansion is a reference to Robin William's death..
Many of the CAH cards don't really go into specifics. They allow the audience and the players to make those connections on their own. Really, that's the core of the humor in Cards Against Humanity. These Crabs cards really miss the point. They've really always missed the point.
They did another holiday promotion in which CAH sent out several daily letters containing various things. Each envelope detailed the story of Santa's death, and the great lizard uprising of 2352.
This year, there were a total of 11 envelopes. The final present last year was a single white card with the recipients name on it. This year, they got the individual cards out of the way immediately on the first day. There was one white card, and one black card. The second day contained magnetic stickers.
The third, fourth, and fifth days contained the official 2014 holiday cards. The themes for each set of cards were Past, Present and Future. Between all the sets there are 30 cards. 6 black cards, and 24 white ones.
The six, seventh, and eighth days included a bunch of fun stuff: taste changing tablets, an indie card game, and web comics in print form.
The ninth, tenth, and eleventh days were more political and satire. The ninth day listed all the campaign contributors to some nefarious congressman from the midterm elections. The tenth day announced their purchased of a private island, and a deed for one square foot of land on the island. And the eleventh day was a small book of email responses.
Fun stuff. Edit: The days are incorrect, but whatever.
By the end of 2014, the following add-ons have been released for Cards Against Humanity, and are available for purchase on the CAH website.
- First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth (Official) Expansions
- Christmas 2012, and Christmas 2013 (12 Days of Holiday Bullshit) Packs
- The 90s Nostalgia Pack
- The Bigger, Blacker Box (which includes the Box Expansion)
The following are unofficial expansions available for purchase on their respective websites:
- Crabs Adjust Humidity Volumes One, Two, Three, and Four (Unofficial)
- Cards & Punishment Volume One* (Unofficial)
And the following have been released in limited quantities at various events.
- Christmas 2014 Pack (Tens Days (or Whatever) of Kwanza)
- PAX East 2013, and PAX Prime 2013 Promo Packs
- PWNMeal (PAX East 2014) Promo Packs
- PAX East 2014, and PAX Prime 2014 Panel Packs*
- The Reject Pack
- The House of Cards Against Humanity Pack*
- The Science Pack*
- The TableTop Pack*
And, again, I have all of the above except for the ones marked with an asterisk*. I mentioned some of those in the previous post, but I'll reiterate.
PAX Panel Packs are 2 sets of 10 cards offered only to attendees of the panels at PAX East 2014 and PAX Prime 2014. During the panel, audience members offer suggestions for cards and the best 10 cards are printed overnight, and given the audience members the next day.
House of Cards Against Humanity Pack was a promotional item offered by Netflix for the release of House of Cards season two, which happened in February 2014. Netflix asked CAH to make some cards, and they created 25 cards: 9 black, 16 white. 100,000 of these packs were offered for free online, and sold out within 45 minutes after Netflix tweeted about it.
The Science Pack is another promotional item put together by CAH for the Bay Area Science Festival. They have mentioned this will be offered online sometime in 2015. There are 18 cards: 6 black, 12 white.
The TableTop Pack is a promotion for the indie web show Table Top, starring Wil Wheaton, apparently. To fund season three they setup something on IndieGoGo, and CAH offered a pack of cards for the $20 mark.
In addition to the above expansions, I also bought a second bigger, blacker box to house my growing collection. As mentioned before, several cards in the original sets were designed to work well with each other, but with so many expansions and unofficial expansions, those connections are lost and diluted. There are a lot of great cards added in the expansions, but I think there are more useless ones. I need to pair down my collection and make a great solid set of cards.
Here's my current collection. For now, I separated all the cards into 3 different stacks: original cards, official expansion cards, and the unofficial expansion cards. I think that's the best way for quality control for the time being.