Local Designers Fund Wikipedia With Dirty Jokes

A Northwest Side game design company known for its crude sense of humor recently wrapped up a holiday sale promotion with a massive charity donation.

Cards Against Humanity LLC launched a pay-what-you-want holiday expansion to its popular card game in early December. After counting up all of the sales and accounting for production expenses, the game's creators announced that they would be donating all profits from the promotion—$70,066.27—to the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia.

"We talked about a number of different charities," said Cards Against Humanity co-creator Max Temkin. "And we thought Wikimedia had a good combination of being universal, in the sense that everyone's heard of it and it helps everyone, and it also has a great social mission, which is basically giving people free access to information."

The reason listed on the game's website phrases the reason in slightly more colorful terms that fans will likely appreciate: "Wikipedia is very important to us because without it we would not have known the exact volume of a dose of a dose of fresh boar sperm or graduated college."

Temkin said transparency and openness have always been important to the Cards Against Humanity team. When the game first launched through a Kickstarter campaign in 2011, the creators made it available to download for free as a PDF for people who wanted to print their own copy of the game. Despite being available to for free, Temkin said they've sold hundreds of thousands of sets since the game's initial launch.

"If there's one thing I'm very proud of for Cards Against Humanity, it's that really, I hope that it helps prove that you can do a business in that very open model," Temkin said. "We can give our product away for free and still have a very profitable, very successful business."

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The game itself is like a vulgar, adult-oriented version of Apples to Apples, with the main selling point being the outrageous things printed on the cards. One player draws a black card with a question or fill-in-the-blank statement on it and the rest of the players choose a white card from their hands to answer with.

The first player chooses the funniest response as the winner, and the process repeats itself when the next player draws a new black card. The creators have billed it "a party game for horrible people."

The holiday pack consisted of 30 new, holiday-themed cards that work as an add-on to the main Cards Against Humanity game. According to Temkin, the order site informed customers that each pack cost about $1 to produce, and that the creators thought it was worth $5.

Customers were then free to name their own price—including free—and the packs were shipped out to them. The sale started on Dec. 3, and all 85,000 holiday packs were sold out by Dec. 8.

According to an infographic posted to the Cards Against Humanity website this week, more than 80 percent of people who ordered the pack chose to pay for it, while only 19.79 percent chose to order it for free.

The promotion generated a total of $295,831.10 in sales after credit card fees. Manufacturing, shipping and web development and hosting costs came out to $225,762.63, leaving the rest for Wikimedia. Temkin said none of the game's creators made any money from the holiday promotion.

The core game is currently sold out, but Temkin said the team hopes to have more copies in stock by late January. It's currently only sold online through the Cards Against Humanity website, although the team is looking into options for eventually wholesaling copies to local stores.

"The main thing for us is, in good faith, we can't start selling games to stores until there's enough on our own website for people who want to buy it right from us," Temkin said. "So we just have to figure out how to meet the demand that's out there just on our website, and then we'll start working with local game stores to do like a wholesale program."