Companies are suing for their tariff money back. ‘Cards Against Humanity’ wants to give some of it to its customers
Cards Against Humanity may be known as the tabletop game most likely to make your mom say filthy words over Christmas, but the company’s latest stunt is an act of uncommon decency.
In response to the U.S. Supreme Court striking down President Trump’s broad, extensive, wildly unpopular tariffs on February 20, the gonzo gaming company has announced a plan to celebrate the victory—and potential tariff refund—with its fans. Cards Against Humanity is now offering them a chance to get back any money they may have overpaid for a CAH game at retail due to tariffs this past year.
This giveaway has been long in the works, according to the gamemaker, but it was never inevitable.
“We’ve been talking about doing this for months, because we always knew the tariffs were blatantly illegal, but we didn’t decide until the ruling came down,” a spokesperson tells Fast Company. “Honestly, we were skeptical that the Supreme Court would actually have the balls to stand up to Trump on this, given how much other illegal stuff they’ve let him keep doing with unsigned shadow docket opinions.”
After the unlikely news broke on February 20, a dam seemed to burst among companies straining to keep up with the tariffs. Hundreds of businesses— including Costco, Revlon, Hasbro, Dyson, and Bausch + Lomb—quickly announced lawsuits against the U.S. government to recover money they’ve spent on tariffs that have now been deemed illegal. Similarly, states are also hoping to recoup their tariff losses, with New York Governor Kathy Hochul calling upon the Trump administration to refund New Yorkers more than $13 billion in tariff payments from this past year, and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker demanding $8.6 billion.
But how many of these tariff refunds will actually reach the people on the hook for the tariffs?
“It seems so obvious,” the CAH spokesperson says. “Most companies passed tariffs onto their customers, and now the companies and their shareholders stand to get the refunds—not the customers who actually paid the tariffs. How is that fair?”
Among the companies looking to retrieve funds, FedEx has stood out for declaring it willpass on to its customers any tariff refunds it might receive. Perhaps others will follow suit, as the refund checks get closer to becoming a reality—especially those companies that raised their prices to foist tariff pain onto their customers. Cards Against Humanity, however, isn’t waiting for its government check to clear before getting the ball rolling on those refunds. Instead, the company—which never raised prices throughout Trump’s tariff escalations, despite claiming to have paid “hundreds of thousands” in tariffs—has created a dedicated website where fans can register their overpayment at retailers and sign up for reimbursement. True to the game’s cheeky, R-rated sensibility, that site is called Get Your Fucking Money Back.
According to the spokesperson, thousands of people have already responded seeking tariff relief. How much they will be getting back, though, depends on which version of the game they bought and how much they were overcharged for it.
“We’ve seen price hikes as high as 40% over MSRP (manufacturer’s suggested retail price) in some big retailers, which is really significant for our customers, especially in the current economy,” the spokesperson says. “Retailers don’t share that data with us, so we don’t know precisely how much they overcharged our fans, but we expect it’s a lot!”
Whether obvious or not, the refund announcement is only the latest stunt for Cards Against Humanity, who is seemingly always ready to inject some eyes-emoji outrageousness into the discourse. The company, whose flagship game plays like competitive Mad Libs for Rick and Morty lovers, has previously sent customers boxes of actual feces and dug an enormous hole in the ground—in both cases, as satirical commentary about Black Friday sales madness.
Some of its stunts have been brazenly political, however, such as the company’s successful 2017 effort to purchase land that lay on the U.S./Mexico border, ostensibly tostifle Trump’s efforts at building a border wall in his first term. (SpaceX later started encroaching into that plot of land, leading Cards Against Humanity to sue Elon Musk over it in 2024.)
More recently, the company addressed Trump’s tariffs head on. Last October, it unveiled a special limited edition of the game calledCards Against Humanity Explains the Joke. How was it different from the company’s normal offerings? By adding a joke-explainer on each card, the game technically counted as an “informational product,” exempting it from tariffs. Also unlike typical CAH editions, all of the proceeds from this one went to the American Library Association to combat book bans and censorship. In the end, almost 20,000 people purchased the “game” during its one-week pre-order window, raising nearly half a million dollars for libraries.
As for this latest effort, though the company won’t be able to share any refunds until receiving its own—a process that will likely take months—for now, fans can delight in the possibility that, in the future, they’ll be saying more expletives while playing the game than while purchasing it.