The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2008–2011
Cards Against Humanity: a free PDF funds via Kickstarter, then tops Amazon's game sales
Eight friends gave away their 2008 party game as a free PDF, then crowdfunded a boxed edition — $15,570 on Kickstarter and nearly 500,000 sets in two years.
Cards Against Humanity
What it had to solve
Eight Chicago high-school friends made a fill-in-the-blank joke game for their 2008 New Year's party. College friends kept asking for copies, so instead of selling, they posted the cards as free PDFs.
How it works
For a New Year's Eve party in December 2008, eight friends from Highland Park High School needed a game for 30 or 40 guests, so they drafted hundreds of fill-in-the-blank prompts in a composition notebook. The game — then called 'Cardenfreude' — was such a hit that the group kept refining it through college.
When college friends wanted copies, Max Temkin and Ben Hantoot built a website and released the cards as free, printable PDFs under a Creative Commons license. Beside the download they added an email field: in a year and a half, 1,632 people registered interest in a professionally printed edition.
On 1 December 2010 they launched a $4,000 Kickstarter for the boxed game. It closed on 30 January 2011 at $15,570 — 389% of goal — with stretch goals adding cards, and a 550-card set shipped that year. Cards Against Humanity sold nearly 500,000 copies in its first two years and became Amazon's bestselling game.
Why it lands
- Making the whole game free let anyone play, so every download seeded new players and word of mouth.
- The email signup turned free downloads into a 1,632-person launch list for the paid edition.
- Kickstarter's deadline and public funding total created urgency and a story press wanted to cover.
- The founders kept the game independent and financed the boxed set from orders rather than investors.
What it did
Nearly 500,000 copies sold in the first two years, making it Amazon's bestselling game, with secondhand copies going for up to three times the $25 retail price while production caught up.
What you can take
Free distribution is demand generation: giving the game away built players, proof and an email list, while the Kickstarter deadline turned that goodwill into orders and press.
Since then
The game stayed a cottage industry with deliberate absurdist stunts — 30,000 boxes of real bull manure sold out in 30 minutes on Black Friday 2014, and a $5 'we'll send you nothing' promotion raised $71,145 in 2015. Cards Against Humanity remains available free on its site while the company expands packs and localized editions.
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