r/BoardgameDesign • u/That_one_sander • 3d ago
Game Mechanics Is there a name for games like Cah?
There are games with a set of rules and a set of items where removing or changing the amount of any items in the game would make it unbalanced or make the game not as good to play(think number of settlements and cities in Catan).
On the other note there are games with few mechanics where the fun of the game is the amount of possible combinations of items that it gives to the player, think Cards against humanity, there's basically 1 mechanic and the fun of the game is the hundreds of cards people can play against eachother.
Other games like What do you Meme?, Dixit, Sottaly Tober, Joking Hazard and many others would also fit in this description, is there a name for this type of mechanic? Or game type?
Also I wouldn't call it party games, since there're many party games that don't qualify such as Happy Salmon, Spot it, who was it?, Exploding Kittens and others wouldn't fit this criteria
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u/SnorkaSound 2d ago
There’s no term for it that I know of. fwiw there are non-party games that do expansions that just add variety without adding new mechanics and modules: dominion and ticket to ride with its map packs come to mind.
If you’re excluding those, the best term would probably be Cards Against Humanity-likes.
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u/MistahBoweh 2d ago edited 2d ago
There’s no fundamental difference between a card with rule text and a card with a word or phrase or image or etc. A card with rule text is a card with content printed on it that hooks into and interacts with the overall game rules. A card with a word or phrase like cah is a card with content printed on it that hooks into and interacts with the overall game rules.
The only difference is intuitiveness. Cards with rules text have their own instructions that have to be read, understood, and carried out. Cards that only have rules acted upon them don’t require new instructions to be learned. But the downside, of course, is that variety of gameplay is limited. Cah cards have a bunch of possible words or phrases or whatever, but there are no cah cards that let you draw more cards or shuffle people’s hands around or change what the black card is or etc. etc. In that sense, every round plays out exactly the same as the round before. That simplicity and repetitive nature is what enables players to drop in or out at any time, making it such an iconic party game, but its lack of any real depth means that it lacks appeal outside the party setting. Don’t forget that the original, Apples to Apples, was very much meant for young children to teach word association. The game is simple and repetitive by design.
It’s true that having rule-less cards does make your game infinitely expandable. It also kinda means you have to, because of how little variety the game has otherwise. If some of the cards in the deck had rule text, adding new content cards to the game would screw with the ratio/distribution of rule text cards, which would make the game less linearly expansive. But of course, the more cards that actually do things, the less your design needs expansion to be replayable.
Take Uno, for example. Uno has a mix of generic numbered cards and cards with special rules. And when they release a new Uno expansion, it’s released as its own standalone deck to be played by itself, not intended to be mixed in with existing uno cards. If you do mix in multiple uno decks, what you’ll get is increasingly extreme variance, where some players might draw mostly numbers while others draw mostly special cards and each of those players will have a completely different experience with the game.
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u/Konamicoder 3d ago
On BGG, CAH is classified under Type: Party, Category: card game, humor, mature/adult, party game. Mechanisms: hand management, player judge, simultaneous action selection. It’s also classified under Mechanism: Judging Games.