Isolation Day 653 Game: Kids Against Maturity

A recent iteration in the fill-in-the-blanks card game genre, Kids Against Maturity is geared as a kid-friendly version of the insanely popular Cards Against Humanity tabletop game.

The rules are simple: Each player (of ideally at least four) takes ten white Answer cards. There’s a stack of blue Question cards which players take turns reading from. Once the Reader reads their card aloud, all the other players choose a card from their hands that best (or at least most amusingly) fills in the blank and they’re collected in the middle of the table. The Reader then mixes the Answer cards up–or perhaps has covered eyes to who the cards came from, all the better to not risk playing favourites–and reads all the answers aloud. The Reader then picks the best/most amusing answer, and whichever player supplied that card earns the Question card as a score. The next player around the table then becomes the Reader. Games can be played to someone reaching a certain number of earned cards first, or timed, and whoever has the most when the timer goes wins.

The age appropriateness of this game is definitely way, way toned down from the Cards Against Humanity sets that it directly mimicks–no, it isn’t produced by the same company, which I can’t imagine will sit well with the people who put out CAH–but there are still some answers that my wife and I thought were too risque for our eleven-year-old. Having now played it (and duly explained concepts like “twig and two berries” and “banana hammock”; yes, there seems to be a lot of reference to male anatomy, though with at least a couple of camel toe themed cards I saw, perhaps we just haven’t played enough to see a male/female balance), we’ll be going through the answers and setting aside the ones that are too mature for her. Potty humour is one thing, but mature humour is another, particularly when playing with a kid.

Having said that, there was a lot of laughter to be had at the sometimes very amusing combinations of randomized nouns and phrases to insert them into, and the games go quickly. There were just the three of us playing, but even adding a fourth, a game played to the first person reaching ten scored cards would’ve been under 20 minutes.

Kids Against Maturity is definitely something that a group would enjoy as long as the kids aren’t too young (the recommended age is 10+, though again, scan the cards ahead of time to gear the game for all players) and the grown-ups don’t mind some good ol’ fashioned low-brow humour.