Joking Hazard
- Board's Eye View
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
Let's get the health warning out there at the start. Joking Hazard isn't for the easily offended. It even subtitles itself as 'an offensive card game'! It's unlikely to win the approval of your HR Department so you'd have to classify it as NSFW (Not Safe For Work). It's a game tho' that can be a lot of fun with the right group of players (ideally, five or six players, but always at least three) and that makes it a good candidate as a potential Fathers Day gift (Fathers Day in the UK this year is on 15 June).
Based on Explosm's Cyanide & Happiness strip cartoon created by Kris Wilson, Rob DenBleyker, Matt Melvin and Dave McElfatrick, Joking Hazard is a storytelling party game. It's played with cards that feature two, mostly indeterminate gender, stick figure characters. Each player has a hand of seven cards and players take it in turns to be the 'judge'. A card is flipped to form a random first panel of a three-panel comic strip; the judge plays a card from their hand to form the second panel, and the other players all contribute their suggestion for the final panel - ideally, the punchline to the joke set up by the first two cards. The judge for the round picks the best, and the player whose card is selected wins the round, taking as victory points the three cards that made up the strip.
Ideally, you play with the third panel submissions played initially face down and shuffled so that the judge doesn't know which player submitted each card. However, if you're playing Joking Hazard as a party game with already intoxicated players there's a real chance that players may forget whose card was whose. Mind you, if players are that drunk they probably won't be unduly concerned about keeping score.
There aren't any complicated rules, so Joking Hazard is a game that can be readily picked up and played straight out of the box. And with a generous 350 cards in the box there are literally millions of potential comic strips to be created; the creativity and humour comes from the different juxtapositions. Just bear our health warning in mind: just like Cards Against Humanity, among all the cards in the box there are many that could potentially cause offence.
We were sent a free copy of the game so we could feature it here on Board's Eye View but it's widely available. If you can't find a copy of Joking Hazard at your local games store, you should be able to order it through Amazon.
