Cards Against Humanity plays a creative prank on Black Friday shoppers every year on the day after Thanksgiving. Their stunt is always creative, surprising, and inventive.
We join in the fun with a massive discount on our “Cards Against Humanity for Parents” game on Amazon.
CAH has fun expansion card games to make us laugh, redesigned into three color-coded boxes – Red Box, Blue Box, and Green Box. They also have our favorite: Cards Against Humanity Family Edition. Of course, we also add KinderPerfect for even more fun!
With the Family Edition for sale on Amazon, we don’t think CAH will have another card pack for this Black Friday. But will they have a crazy humans vs. computers contest like last year? Or the 99% Off Sale from the year before? Or buy more land on the US/Mexican border? Or just dig a senseless hole?
What could be in the mind of CAH co-creator Max Temkin and his team of 10 co-founders? How are they going to prank us in 2022? Who is going to give them money no matter how crazy their idea? We are just as curious as you are!
To help you think about the Cards Against Humanity Black Friday 2022 prank, here is a look back a previous Black Friday jokes they’ve played on us all.
Let’s take a retrospective look at the foolishness CAH played on the rest of us over the years. You have to love their creativity, dedication to the craft of humor, and chutzpah to deliver such crazy stunts every Black Friday.
Usually on Black Friday, every company in America wants you to give them money. For 2021, Cards Against Humanity launched an effort to give us money! Their idea is for CAH to experience the thrill of buying things on Black Friday.
Every 20 minutes, they revealed something special they wanted for Black Friday. Give them what they want and they gave you $5, $100, or even $10,000! For example:
Best of all, you could get paid multiple times for every individual thing you, but you could only participate in each thing once.
2020 was a tough year for everyone. A pandemic was raging, American democracy was crumbling, and Cards Against Humanity felt that creating a prank just felt wrong. Instead, they donated their entire $250,000 Black Friday budget to nonprofits suggested by their staff.
These organizations fight for causes CAH cares about, like Black Lives Matter, voting rights, and fair housing and they called on us all not to spend $5 to fill the Chicago River with spaghetti or whatever, but to donate to these organizations instead.
For 2019, CAH created an Artificial Intelligence Challenge. They taught a computer how to write Cards Against Humanity cards using a neural network called “GPT-2” made by OpenAI that tries to predict the word that comes next in that text. CAH trained its GPT-2 on the text of 44,000 white cards. It produced 30 cards, including:
Over 16 hours, CAH writers battled this powerful card-writing algorithm to see who could write the most popular new pack of cards. If the writers won, they’ll get a $5,000 holiday bonus. If the AI won, CAH would fire the writers, replacing expensive, cannabis-smoking humans with cold-hearted machines.
The warm hearts of CAH human writers created 30 beautiful cards about the human condition, including:
So what was the result? The writers sold $82,.860 in CAH expansion packs versus the AI bot’s $81,135 in sales – a 2% expansion pack premium. The humans kept their jobs for now, and will be replaced by automation in 2020 instead of in 2019. Or hey, maybe not.
For 2018, Cards Against Humanity took its disdain for the capitalistic holiday to an absurd new extreme with a 99% off sale on spectacularly bizarre items like:
“Black Friday probably represents the worst things about our culture,” says Cards Against Humanity co-creator Max Temkin. “It’s this really repulsive consumerist frenzy right after a day about being thankful for what you have. So it’s always seemed like a really good subject for parody to us. It’s really satisfying to see people get the joke and participate in it. And hopefully it brings a smile or a laugh to people on kind of a shitty day.”
Last year, 150,000 people paid Cards Against Humanity $15 to save America with six days of incredible surprises, including:
In 2016, Cards Against Humanity celebrated Black Friday with a Holiday Hole – a massive hole in the ground for no reason whatsoever. When asked “Where is the hole?” they responded with the sad, and telling, “America. And in our hearts.”
Still, online donors contributed $100,573 to dig a giant hole (that they eventually filled up, for insurance reasons). Who would pay real money to dig a hole? Here is their top donor list – aka the biggest fools ever:
In 2015, Cards Against Humanity offered people the ability to buy absolutely nothing for $5. And yes, 11,248 people gave them $5. Even more shocking, 1,199 people gave them more than $5 by filling out the form more than once. One enthusiastic fan of the card game even went so far as to give them $100 for nothing. Cards Against Humanity made a windfall profit of $71,145.
The CAH staff spent the money on themselves – buying fun things from a Macbook Pro to a gold vibrator and lube – and donated to causes they cared about. We love that they were transparent with the money that American consumers game them for absolutely nothing.
In 2014, CAH went to a farm in Texas and bought enough pasteurized bullshit to package it into 30,000 boxes of poop, which they sold for $6. And game co-creator Max Temkin says all of the made-in-America bullshit was sold out in less than two hours. And then an aftermarket sprang up on eBay with people selling their “Bullshit” packages at a 600% markup.
Now it wasn’t all for naught. CAH did make 20 cents on each $6 box of bullshit and they donated the profits to Heifer International, a charity that providing livestock to poor people to eradicate poverty and hunger.
In 2013, CAH co-creator Max Temkin thought to himself that anyone can do a sale for Black Friday, so what could CAH do that is different? How about raising prices by $5? Yep, that’s exactly what they did. They raised the price of CAH from $25 to $30 on Amazon.
The result? They sold more games than usual on Black Friday, maintaining their lead as the most popular card game in America, and saw a nice sales lift on “Regret Saturday” from people who were waiting to buy the game until it came back down in price.
In 2012, CAH didn’t do a Black Friday prank. Instead they issued a “pay-what-you-want” Holiday Pack of 30 vaguely holiday-themed cards. People gave about $3.75 on average for the expansion pack, with CAH donating over $70,000 in profits to the Wikimedia Foundation.
In 2013, they did a promotion called 12 Days of Holiday Bullshit, sending out 12 tiny presents over 12 days to 100,000 people, including a lump of coal and a card with the buyer’s name on it. The profits from that 30-card expansion pack went to DonorsChoose.
In 2014, CAH did a promo called 10 Days or Whatever of Kwanzaa and sent 11 presents to 250,000 people, including miracle fruit and 1 square foot of a private island they bought called Hawaii 2. The 30 cards raised $250,000 for the Sunlight Foundation.
We’re not waiting for CAH. We are starting our more traditional Black Friday Sale now with a crazy deal: 66% OFF All 3 KinderPerfect Games.
All three games are just $14.99 for Amazon Prime Members. Order now to rock your adult game nights this holiday season with moms, dads, grandparents, and other caregivers.
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