By Jasmine Durst; Photo Credits to Jasmine Durst
Inspiration from Susquehanna’s Sub-Popular Culture Association
Cards Against Humanity
“Cards Against Humanity’s” official release occurred in May 2011, making its public debut.
According to Printverse, the game originated as a homemade party game created by eight Highland Park School alumni.
A Kickstarter campaign began on Dec. 1, 2010, raising $15,000 and surpassing its $4,000 funding goal and enabling production.
This card game is an adult fill-in-the-blank party game where players match provocative white answer cards with black prompt cards chosen by a rotating judge.
Printverse said that the original name was “Cardenfreude,” involving players writing humorous responses to topic questions.
When the name changed to its current name, the white cards featured pre-written answers.
Printverse said, “It drew inspiration from various games, including ‘Magic: The Gathering,’ ‘Balderdash,’ ‘Charades,’ and notably ‘Mad Libs.’”
Blood on the Clocktower
“Blood on the Clocktower” was released on Aug. 20, 2022.
You can purchase the game or even make your own role sheet for free on the Blood on the Clocktower website.
On the website, the top says, “The Pandemonium Institute presents the hit social deduction game where death is not the end.”
The website says, “Blood on the Clocktower is a game of murder and mystery, lies and logic, deduction and deception for five-to-twenty courageous players and one devious storyteller.”
Players will sit in a circle, and each player will receive either a ‘good’ or ‘evil’ token with their unique character on it.
Good players share information they receive throughout the ‘nights’ to solve who is evil and eliminate them, and evil players lie about who they are and what they know.
If the good team can piece together who the demon is in the game and execute them, they win the game.
If the demon can create distrust, evade detection, and wipe out the town, the evil team wins the game.
Werewolf
“Werewolf” was originally invented as “Mafia” in 1986 or 1987 by Dmitry Davidoff, a Russian psychology and sociology student at Moscow State University in the Soviet Union.
The game, according to the Games & Gaming Round Table of the American Library Association, was used to explore different ways of understanding time.
It modeled the conflict between an informed minority and an uninformed majority.
In 1997, American interactive fiction writer Andrew Plotkin (known as Zarf) redesigned the mafia theme into Werewolf, replacing the mafia with werewolves and villagers to make the setting more universally relatable.
Medium wrote, ““Mafia’s resonance is with some of the worst, but most universal, traits of human society. Every culture has had its witch-hunts and pogroms, and anxiety about being caught on the wrong side of persecution is a fear that crosses borders, languages, and eras. Mafia, in its abstract, trivial way, lets us play with those fears.” © by Wired (Robertson, 2010).”
According to Medium, from the 2000s to the present, the game expanded online and grew into a massive social and tech-culture staple, eventually inspiring commercial variations like “Ultimate Werewolf.”
Two Rooms and a Boom
“Two Rooms and a Boom” was released in 2013 after a Kickstarter campaign ran from October to November 2013, and an updated second edition was released in 2016.
According to BoardGameGeek, within the box, players get rulebooks, leader cards and 110 character cards.
The character cards come on red, blue, green, purple or grey cards with an image and description of their role.
There are two teams – red and blue – in two rooms with the blue team having the ‘President’ role and the red team having the ‘Bomber’ role.
Each round, the leader of the room will choose ‘hostages’ to exchange with the other room leader.
The goal of the game for the blue team is to keep the President and Bomber in opposite rooms, and the goal of the game for the red team is to have these two roles in the same room.
The Jackbox Party Pack Series
The first Jackbox Party Pack was released on Nov.26, 2014, and the latest Jackbox, Jackbox Party Pack 12, was released on Oct. 15, 2026.
Jackbox Games, Inc. is an American video game developer based in Chicago, Illinois, best known for the You Don’t Know Jack series of quiz-based party video games and The Jackbox Party Pack series.
Founded by Harry Nathan Gottlieb, the company operated as Jellyvision Games from 1995 until its closure in 2001.
One person hosts the game on a TV, computer or console where the main game room and questions are displayed.
Players do not need extra physical game controllers; everyone uses their own mobile device or web browser as their private controller to submit answers and drawings.
The host can buy and run Jackbox Party Packs via Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV or online through services like Netflix Games.