Retros Against Humanity

1. Put your name in and start the room. That is all it asks for: how long the retro runs is settled in the lobby, when you can see who turned up.
2. Share the link. Everyone opens it on whatever they have to hand and types a display name. Up to twenty people, and there is nothing to install.
3. Wait in the lobby until the room is there. Nothing is dealt yet, which is the point of it — everybody answers the first prompt at the same time, so it is worth the minute it costs to let people arrive. Choose the pack and how many prompts while you wait: six is the default, and you can draw extra cards later if the conversation is going somewhere. It is the last moment to change either, because the room shuffles its deck once and deals off the front of it.
4. Pick a pack, if the House one is not the right register for this team. House is the original deck — warm, daft, and safe to read out in front of anybody. After Hours is sharper, and aimed at the process rather than at anybody in the room: it is the one for a team that knows each other and would rather say the thing. Read both before you choose — the deck is on the Play page without opening a room — and remember that whoever is in the room hears every prompt read out.
5. Start the first prompt. It lands on every screen at once, and everybody writes one card for it there and then, or passes. A card is fifty characters, so it is the point rather than the explanation — the explanation is what the discussion is for. The room shows who has answered and nothing about what. Your screen becomes the table, with a place for everybody and a card landing face down — and a sound as it lands — as each of them answers. Worth sharing, if you are on a call. The sound is the same for every card and every seat, and there is a switch for it at the foot of the room.
6. Turn the cards over when the room has answered. The table tells you who is still choosing, and nothing turns over until you say so — so a slow answer holds nobody up and a quick one shuts nobody out. The cards come into the middle, are shuffled, and deal back out face up with no names on them — the shuffle is real, and it is why no card on the table can be traced back to the seat it came from. They stay that way: nothing later in the round, and nothing in the record, says whose a card was. Press Add Actions when the room has read them, which opens the discussion.
7. Capture the actions against the prompt while you are talking about it, and move on. They are yours to write down — the room says them out loud, and everybody gets them in the record at the end.
8. Finish the retro, and the record goes up on every screen — anybody in the room can copy it or download it. Give people a moment to do that before you close the room, because closing sends everybody home.

If somebody has nothing for a prompt, that is fine — passing is a real answer. A person with nothing to say about that question has said everything they had about it, which is the outcome you wanted. There is no pile of cards to write before the game starts and no target to hit; one honest card a prompt is the whole ask.

A seat that goes away has not left. Phones lock, and the seat and the played card both stay exactly where they were — so the room marks the seat rather than removing it, and the round is never held up waiting for it. Somebody who unlocks their phone comes straight back to their own card.

Retros Against Humanity was created by Box UK, who published it as a free agile game under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. It is a variation of Cards Against Humanity, which is published under the same licence. This is an unofficial implementation and neither is affiliated with it.

The House deck here is Box UK's, carried across as written with two cards changed. One was a joke at the expense of a real broadcaster's guests, which is the single card in the set that could genuinely land badly read aloud in somebody's retro; the other named Box UK itself, which reads oddly in a tool that is not theirs. Everything else stands, dated references and all — they are the character of the deck, and none of them are unkind.

The After Hours deck is not Box UK's and is not covered by any of the above. Those thirty-three prompts were written for this site, they carry no third-party licence, and they need no attribution — which is why a retro played with them exports a record that credits nobody, rather than one carrying a credit that would not be true. The credit above belongs to the game and to the House deck, and it goes out with a House retro exactly as it always has.