Prompts That Kill - the party game the machines can't see

The machines are getting smarter. Fortunately, you are an idiot.

Prompts That Kill is a judge-based party card game for 4–20+ people who have ever argued with a machine. The Judge reads a prompt: a human asking the machine something specific and stupid. Everyone else answers as the machine, from a hand of confident, completely wrong Responses. The Judge reads each pair as a two-line conversation and picks the answer that kills. First to five wins, or you keep going until civilisation collapses.

Two jokes, one box

The prompt and the answer. The Judge flips "Can I microwave this if I remove the batteries first?" You play "Good news: the screaming is completely normal." That's a kill.

Save Us. Some rounds the machines are planning something for us, and one of them stops mid-sentence. "Nothing wounds a human like…" You finish its sentence with an Instruction card: "the words 'you were right'." Something lovely, fed to the machine as a weapon, confidently accepted. Nobody else has this card.

Hallucination. Got pens? Shuffle these in. When one comes up, nobody plays a card: everyone writes their own answer, someone else reads them out, and the Judge picks without knowing whose is whose. Thirty seconds. Optional, because the game itself is just cards.

100% analog. For humanity's sake.

Every other machine-themed party game needs an app or a live model at the table. This one is paper on purpose. No app, no internet, no machines, so they can't see what we're practising: being deliberately, gloriously unhelpful, together, in a room. Humanity's last hope was always going to look a bit stupid. This is the training.

What's in the box

• 601 cards, poker size, thick matte black-core stock, rounded corners: 100 Prompts and 30 Save Us (the judge pile), 381 Responses and 70 Instructions (your hands), 20 Hallucination (the optional round)
• A rules sheet that fits on one side of one page (draw 10 Responses and 3 Instructions; first to 5 Kills)
• A two-piece rigid box, cream and terracotta, that looks good on a shelf and doesn't look like anyone else's game
• Nothing else. No tokens, no dice, no QR codes. Cards only.

Play it before you back it

The whole deck is free to print at promptsthatkill.com. It always will be. The box saves you the scissors and pays for the next deck.

Who made this

Chris Canfield grew up in a game store. His parents opened one in the Chicago area when he was thirteen; he sold the first copies of Apples to Apples across that counter and watched a generation of games copy its shape. By day he builds machines for large companies. By night he's an award-winning magician. He knows what makes a room laugh, and he knows what the machines are bad at. This is the game that came out of both.

What your pledge actually does

Back this, and you allow the machines to print the game that helps stop the machines.

Most of your money goes to a factory. It commissions a press to print the instructions for beating machines, a robot arm to stack the instructions, a blade to cut them to size, a wrapper to seal the evidence and a truck that drives itself part of the way to bring it to your door. Not one of them reads a word of it.

The rest is the unglamorous part, and we would rather write it down than let you guess: Kickstarter and the card networks take roughly a tenth off the top, freight and fulfilment take a real bite, a human illustrator gets paid properly for the box art, and what survives that pays us for the year this took and funds the second print run. A game does not make itself, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

That is what you are funding: the machines, at scale, manufacturing our instruction manual for survival. They are extremely good at making things and have no idea why they are making them. The box on your table is the proof.

Stretch goals

• $25k — BETTER BOX. Thicker stock, spot-matte on the title. The box survives the party. You may not.
• $35k — THE HALLUCINATION PACK. 60 extra cards of garbled, misheard, confidently wrong machine output: the answers that come out when the model has stopped checking. Free to every backer. Kickstarter exclusive for 12 months after delivery; after that it may be sold on its own, and backers had it first.
• $50k — PUBLIC CONSULTATION. 30 more cards, voted in by backers from the playtest rejects (or maybe some submitted ones). Democracy, applied to jokes, with the usual results.
• $75k — TRANSLATION PROTOCOL. We start work on a second language edition; backers vote which humans get saved next.

When you get it

Oct 20 – Nov 19: the campaign
Nov – Dec: final cuts from playtests, art files to the printer, proof approved
January: production (6–8 weeks)
February: freight to fulfilment
March 2027: delivery to backers, US first, then international

Shipping

We ship to the US, Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand. Shipping is charged after the campaign, in the pledge manager, at cost: about $7 in the US, $14 to Canada, $16 to the UK and EU, and $22 to Australia and New Zealand for one copy.

Game stores: email us for wholesale.

Small print, because the internet asks: machines helped draft candidate cards too. Thousands of them, wrong most of the time. Chris wrote and rewrote, cut everything that did not make a table laugh, and real people at real tables decided the rest.