photo: Courtesy of cards against humanity

Can you come up with a card game as good as this one? Join the Tabletop Design Deathmatch.

The team that brought us Cards Against Humanity (CAH), a popular and infamously explicit card game, is announcing today that it will host the first-ever Tabletop Design Deathmatch. Can you design an irresistible card game, too? Listen up.

Starting today through August 1, aspiring designers can get to work cooking up a new game. Then, the submitted games will be narrowed down to 16 finalists, who will pitch their designs to a panel of experts at Gen Con Indy 2013, an annual gaming convention. The single winner will receive $7,500 toward the costs of a first-run production of their game, funded by CAH and other sponsors, as well as a table on the floor at Gen Con Indy 2014. 

If you haven't heard of CAH, it's a dirty, not-suitable-for-work (or your parent's house) version of Apples to Apples. One person draws a black card with a partially complete phrase written on it. The other players look through their set of white cards, and then fill in the blanks with the funniest, craziest, or raunchiest few words that form a sentence.

For example, a black card may read, "Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and ____." Another player could respond with "dead parents" or "puppies!" These are on the safe side, but you may feel your cheeks burning at some of the options. 

A lot of CAH players might not know that the game got its start in Highland Park. It began as a free online game but expanded when its eight founders launched a Kickstarter campaign in December 2010 to fund a print version. Co-founder Max Temkin was inspired to create the contest after he saw the Play Test Hall, where designers brought in personal game prototypes, at one Gen Con Indy.

Now the crew is starting the Deathmatch to help a new design team make a mark.

"We want someone a little more raw," Temkin says. "We're looking to find someone who doesn't have the experience we've acquired and help them become established. We wish this existed when Cards Against Humanity was created."

CAH is dispicable, hilarious, and available for purchase on Amazon for $25, or you can download the online verson for free.