Cards Against Cryptography

Cards Against Cryptography is based on Cards Against Humanity, which described itself as "a party game for horrible people". Cards Against Cryptography is not quite as mean, but still has bit of an edge. We are big fans of the cryptographic community, and hope this game is played in a spirit of fun. But if you don't like crude or offensive humor, this game may not be for you.

Basic Rules

See RULES.md for the rules.

License

Cards Against Cryptography is shamelessly based on Cards Against Humanity, which was released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/).

Cards Against Cryptography is released under the same license, which means you can use, remix, and share the game for free, but cannot sell it.

Contributing

You can submit pull requests to propose new cards; see src/black.txt and src/white.txt.

Building

The top-level Makefile can be used to recompile printable PDF and PNG versions of the cards:

make PDFs PNGs

This should work on reasonable Linux or macOS systems. You need to have xelatex, python3, and ImageMagick's convert command in your path. One of the cards uses the Comic Sans font, so you need to have that on your system as well, possibly by installing the TeXLive packaging comicsans or installing it in your operating system's fonts folder.

You can build specific releases of the cards using environment variables, e.g.

make PDFs PNGs WHITE=white-ec19-expansion BLACK=black-ec19-expansion

Printed copies

Since Cards Against Humanity was released under a BY-NC-SA 2.0 license, the "non-commercial" aspect of that license implies that we cannot sell you a copy of this game. A small number of copies were provided as prizes at the Asiacrypt 2018 rump session and the Eurocrypt 2019 rump session. There may or may not be printed copies available as prizes at future rump sessions — have a funny rump session talk prepared, just in case!

You can make your own printed copy in three ways.

1. Print at home. Under the PDFs-to-print folder, there are printable PDFs of all the cards, formatted for 2-sided printing on either A4 or letter paper. You'll use up all the toner if print pages and pages of all-black backgrounds, so you should probably use the gray background.
2. Print at a local printshop. You could also take the PDFs to your local print shop and have them print it on cardstock (80-pound or higher). Use a paper cutter to cut out the cards.
3. Print via a commercial custom card manufacturer. We printed our version of Cards Against Cryptography using MakePlayingCards.com. The folder PNGs-to-print contains the PNG images required to print a deck of cards at MakePlayingCards.com's US Game Deck Size, along with a bi-fold (4 side) instruction booklet. At the time we wrote this, 1 set of cards, along with a booklet and plain white box, is $34.35 (US dollars), plus shipping (approximately $10 for standard shipping to most countries). Uploading the images and configure the project takes about 10 minutes.

History

The first edition of Cards Against Cryptography was released at the rump session of Asiacrypt 2018. There was an expansion pack at the rump session of Eurocrypt 2019, and a special "work"-from-home virtual expansion pack at the virtual rump session of virtual Eurocrypt 2020.