PromptsThat Kill™
Please prompt irresponsibly.
A ridiculously simple party card game. One player asks the machine something stupid. Everyone else answers as the machine. The worst answer wins. Played with real cards, at a real table, where the machines can’t watch — because confusing them might be our last great idea.
How it works
Flip. Prompt. Kill. Repeat.
Bonus move, not a rule: read the answers in your most confident machine voice. First to 5 Kills wins. Or keep going until civilization collapses. No app, no phone, no machines required.
Try one round
You are the Judge.
A ten-second taste of how a round feels at the table. The prompt is face up. You are the machine. Tap the answer that kills.
The second core joke
Save Us. Trick the machine.
Most rounds you answer as the machine. On a Save Us round you get to be human again. The machines are working out how to hurt us, and this one has stopped mid-sentence. Everyone finishes the sentence with an Instruction card from the three beside their hand: something perfectly lovely, fed to the machine as a weapon. Best sabotage wins.
The joke is not that the instruction makes sense. It is that the machine believes it.
The optional wildcard
Hallucination
Got pens? Shuffle the Hallucination cards into the Judge's pile. When one comes up, nobody plays a card: the Judge flips the next card, a Prompt or a Save Us, everyone writes their own answer to it, the player beside the Judge reads them all out, and the Judge picks one without knowing whose is whose. Thirty seconds. Do not overthink it.
Thirty seconds is the point: long enough to write a line, too short to write a comedy routine. A hallucinated answer can be illogical, impossible, offensive or fabricated. It only has to make the setup funnier. It is optional because it needs a pen; the game itself is just cards.
Why it exists
The machines are getting smarter. Fortunately, you are an idiot.
A fast, judge-based party card game where a human asks the machine something stupid and you, as the machine, answer with confident nonsense; plus sabotage rounds and hallucinations. A box of cards, a table, and your worst friends.
It is analog on purpose. No app, no internet, no machine at the table, so the machines can't see what we're practising. Think of it as a training camp for humanity: the only way to beat the machines is to be very, very human, somewhere they can't watch.
That is the quiet, subversive point of the whole thing. Every round is a drill in the one skill the machines can't copy: being deliberately, gloriously unhelpful, and laughing about it with other people in a room. Humanity's last hope was always going to look a bit stupid. This is the training.
The scoreboard nobody asked for
That is 2.9 machines each, and 53% of the web is already them, not us.
You can’t comprehend exponential growth. That’s what they’re counting on.
The receipts
- 23.9 billion machines — connected devices, 21.1 billion at the end of 2025, +14% a year. IoT Analytics
- 8.3 billion humans, +69 million a year. UN
- 53% of web traffic is automated. Imperva
- 2 million machine minds published. Running copies: uncounted. Hugging Face
- Agents per company nearly tripled in a year. Salesforce
- 1.3 billion agents by 2028 — a forecast, paid for by the company citing it. Microsoft / IDC
- 800 million people talk to one machine every week. OpenAI, Oct 2025
- Training compute doubles every five months. Moore’s law took eighteen. Epoch AI
Phones turned off. Unplug anything that listens. They can’t learn what they can’t hear.
100% analog. For humanity's sake. Better prompts for a brighter tomorrow.
Free to print
Print & play, free
In the tradition of card games that started as a free download: a complete deck is yours to download, print at home, cut out and play. 213 cards plus the quick-start rules card, eight to a page. The box holds 601, and every card in it ends up here eventually; the box only ever saves you the scissors. If it makes your table laugh, tell us; if a card dies, tell us that too.
Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: share it, remix it, don't sell it.
What it might look like
The box
Full disclosure: the machines drew this. A human will be paid to draw the real one. The machines have filed a complaint.
The human behind the machine
Who made this
Chris Canfield grew up in a game store.
When he was thirteen his parents opened a game store in the Chicago area, then another. He spent his teens behind the counter, selling games, playing games, and watching what made a table laugh. He remembers selling the very first copies of Apples to Apples, and then watching game after game copy the shape of it: read one card, everyone plays one, the judge picks, repeat.
He wanted to take that shape and point it at the most ridiculous conversation of our time: talking to machines. Prompts That Kill is that idea, on cards, at a table.
Today he works in AI, building it for large companies by day, and he is an award-winning magician by night (Penn & Teller: Fool Us, the Magic Castle). He also wrote and performs a one-man show about the games we play. So he has spent his whole life on three things this game needs: games, machines, and making a room laugh.
Questions people actually ask
How it works, in short
How do you play?
One player is the Judge and reads out a Prompt card: a ridiculous question a human asked a machine. Everyone else answers as the machine by playing a Response card from a hand of ten. The Judge reads each pair aloud as a two-line conversation and picks the answer that kills. First to five Kills wins.
How many players, and how long?
Four to twenty-plus, best with four to six. Thirty to ninety minutes, and you stop when the room has had enough.
Is it really free?
A complete 213-card deck is free to print, and there is a 12-page pocket deck for a short game. The 601-card box saves you the scissors, and every card in it is released free over time.
Do I need an app, a phone or an AI?
No. It is paper on purpose: no app, no internet, no machines at the table.
What is a Save Us card?
One of the machines planning how to harm humans, cut off mid-sentence. Instead of answering as the machine, you finish its sentence as a human, with an Instruction card: something lovely that the machine now believes is a weapon.
What is the Hallucination card?
An optional round for tables with pens. Shuffle the Hallucination cards into the Judge's pile; when one comes up, everyone writes their own answer, another player reads them out, and the Judge picks without knowing whose is whose.
Is it family friendly?
No. 17+, adult and older-teen humour.
When can I buy it?
Not yet. A Kickstarter is planned for autumn 2026, delivery in 2027. The kill list gets told first.
Be first to prompt irresponsibly
Join the kill list
Launch news, new cards, and playtest calls. Nothing else, and never sold. The Machine will confirm your enlistment personally. Saving humanity one bad prompt at a time.
You will get an email only when there is something worth killing time for.