Planners, Architects Launch 'Cards Against Urbanity'

The tropes of city planning and neighborhood revitalization—dog parks! bike lanes! Millennials with beards!—have become so commonplace that they're the butt of jokes.

So starting today you can formalize those jokes with Cards Against Urbanity. It's a project from D.C.-based GreaterPlaces.com and DoTank DC, a tactical urbanism group. They're launching a Kickstarter for the game and a kickoff party this evening in Arlington.

Not familiar with Cards Against Humanity? That game, itself a spin on an older card game, Apples To Apples, involves one player playing a card with a question or fill-in-the-blank sentence on it. All other players must play a card with a noun or phrase that they think best fits the question. The first player judges the answers and awards a point to the player who had the best or funniest answer. Mostly, it's an excuse to make up ridiculously offensive jokes.

Cards Against Urbanity replaces all the cards in a CAH deck with jokes by and about urbanists. They're less offensive than CAH, but definitely irreverent. Players can create sentences like "Architects should really pay more attention to _______", filling in the blank with "a blue-haired amateur historian," "Mr. Monorail," or "Peak beard."