Custom CAH Cards

I made a custom expansion deck for Cards Against Humanity! I used my own project on GitHub that takes a newline separated text file and creates high resolution PNG images to be used at MakePlayingCards.

Cards Against Humanity (CAH) is a card game that involves two types of cards, black and white. One black card is drawn per round, and its text is either a question or a statement with up to three blanks. Players must use the white cards to answer the question or fill in the blanks. It has a certain notoriety as most of the cards are very politically incorrect or use a lot of shock humor.

MakePlayingCards is a printing service for playing cards. They offer a large variety of playing card sizes, card stock, packaging, and customization options. They allow the front and back of each card to be customized with your own uploaded images.

The base game for CAH is released under a Creative Commons license and is distributed digitally in a PDF format. CAH encourages people to print the game themselves. The PDF version of the game is not easily customizable and uses small square cards, rather than the poker sized cards you get when you buy the game or its expansions. My project, as well as several others like it, aims to create full-size custom cards. Most of the other generators I found at the time were web-based; I wanted something I could run locally from a terminal and have full control over, so I made my own.

Creation

In my generator, I start with base SVG images for the different card faces: white backs, black backs, white fronts, black pick 1 fronts, black pick 2 fronts, and black pick 3 fronts. I created them using bits of media from the PDF and measurements from official CAH cards. Those can be customized as well, which is useful for denoting your cards as an expansion. The CAH expansion cards place a number or an image inside the third square in the logo placed on the bottom left of the card. In my cards, I placed an image of a cat, so they may be differentiated from the the official cards.

The generator takes in a newline separated text file and does a bunch of awk magic to determine what type of card the text is for, determine the proper length of blanks, format, and stuff the text inside a copy of the SVG file. The text file is obviously customizable but so are the resulting SVG images, named as numbers in the order they were created in an out_svg directory. Before the last step of converting to PNG, you can edit each card in Inkscape. This is useful for adjusting formatting or creating special cards that consist of more than just text. For my deck, it was useful in creating an especially elaborate inside joke card that acts as a flagship for the deck.

They came out pretty well! I have a few nitpicks, but overall they look very professional and certainly usable. The placement of the text and logo seems exactly correct, and everything is bold enough to read very clearly. I personally know there is a slight difference in the font used for my cards (Helvetica vs. Nimbus Sans L Bold), but there is no noticeable difference.

On close inspection, they do suffer in comparison to the official cards, and I think I shall be making some changes to the generator to hopefully fix some of the issues.

Resolution

My first nitpick is they came out slightly grainy. The most noticeable distortion is in the logo on the bottom left of the cards, which uses very thin lines to create the boxes. The logo is much better defined on the official cards. Currently, my generator creates 1200 DPI PNG images, which may not have been quite a high enough resolution. Since my generator uses vector based images, I can create as high a resolution output as I want, but I had thought 1200 DPI would suffice. The overly large DPI may have been the cause; I have since changed the DPI to 800, and make TIFF images.

Colors

The color of the white background on the official cards is more of an off-white, while mine stand out as a full white. The reverse is true of the black cards; The official cards seem to use pure black for the background, while I used an off-black found in the pdf for black text and background. The off-whiteness and off-blackness of the white card backs seems to change in different CAH expansions. A third expansion white back is lighter overall, in text and background. I couldn’t find an off-white in the PDF, and since it varies, I suspect it has more to do with the way CAH cards are printed. I think the only change I can make to the generator is to make the black backgrounds pure black. On close inspection, I do believe the black text on the white cards matches the off-black I am using, so I’ll leave that alone.

Finish

The finish of the cards is slightly different. I ordered 310 GSM Linen cards, they have a dotted surface on both sides of the card. Shining a LED flashlight through them reveals white light where it breaks though, but they block most of the light. The official cards have a smooth back, and a dotted grid surface on the front. It also varies between expansions, a third expansion card looks to be better quality with a more uniform dotted surface. Shining the flashlight through them produces an orange light.

Dimensions

The card dimensions are a little off, which seems to be the fault of MPC. There are two standards of poker sizes available on MPC: 63x88mm and 2.5x3.5in (63.5x88.9mm). I measured an official CAH card as 62.91x88.16mm, so I ordered 63x88mm. I measured one of the cards I received as 63.34x88.51mm. The extra length is a noticeable difference when holding one card on top of another. Oddly, I measured a coupon card from MPC as 63.16x87.96mm. Since mine are not quite the inches size, I am not sure if there was a fault in cutting the cards or if they made the wrong size.

Warping

My cards came warped (with a click bend), but so are the official cards, so that’s okay. I ordered ‘shrink-wrapped’ packaging from MPC, which I suspect caused the cards to warp during shipping. I recommend getting a cheap box instead. Hopefully they don’t wrap the cards in the box packaging.

Other Shit

The “A special monkey that shits foam blocks” card has a story. My sister-in-law, whom I credit for creating our flagship card, owns the official ‘Bigger, blacker box’ that helps organize the cards. Inside are card separators and foam blocks that help to fill the empty space in the box. With the goal of organizing Catan tiles, I wondered where I could get a large amount of these foam blocks for myself. I emailed Cards Against Humanity for details. The response was completely unhelpful but at least entertaining:

Hi Casey,

We have a special monkey that shits them.

best,

Holly

Published

2015-02-28