Say Anything‘s rule book is fourteen pages and only two have rules on them. The first five are a picture book about the designer leaving his oppressive New York City hedge fund job to make board games, which is super cringey and really rubs me the wrong way. There’s also a two-page ad for Say Anything. Yes, two pages of Say Anything‘s rule book is an ad for itself. Even more, there’s an additional two-page ad for the family version of Say Anything. Ridiculous. Anyway, this is a review of the game and not its rulebook, so I suppose I should get to it. Okay. You ready? It’s terrible. One of the worst party games I’ve played. I genuinely like Cards Against Humanity more than this game, and I hate Cards Against Humanity. Say Anything is an awkward, useless party game that reduces the simple act of asking people questions into a stilted mélange of embarrassment.
Here’s how the game is played: on a player’s turn, they draw a question card and read it aloud to the other players. Here are some sample questions:
- Which celebrity would be the most fun to hang out with for a day?
- What would I want most for my next birthday?
- What TV theme song is the most fun to sing with friends?
If you’re not already running for the hills to avoid playing this game you and I are very different people. Next, whichever players can tolerate being asked something so asinine write their answers on small dry-erase boards and place them face up in the center of the table. Here’s where things get really crazy. The player whose turn it is then uses something aggressively referred to in the rule book as the “SELECT-O-MATIC 5000” to secretly choose their favorite answer. That is its official name; the designers expect you to say those words out loud. There is no provided recourse. I’d rather die.
Following this, the other players vote for which answer they think was selected. The chosen answer is revealed and points are awarded for correct guesses and also to the player who wrote the selected answer. You are expected to endure twelve rounds of this.
I’m not sure what part of Say Anything is supposed to be fun. If the point was to elicit crazy answers to the questions the game could not have failed harder. Balderdash provides a much more fertile ground for player creativity because its writing prompts actually leave room for humor. How are you supposed to answer a question like “Who is the most overrated band of all-time?” in a humorous manner? You can’t. That’s not good. Without humor, here is what the social cadence of the game devolves into:
- A question is asked that solicits player opinions.
- One player chooses the opinion they most agree with.
- The other players guess which opinion that player agreed with the most.
Ugh. What the designers have attempted here is to turn banal conversation into a party game. For what purpose, who knows? I guess because they couldn’t ride the Wits & Wagers gravy train forever. I’m not even sure the game works as intended. Players have no incentive to tell the truth, so half the time they just end up propitiating the judge of the current question. This creates the completely joyless social puzzle of trying to anticipate what metrics said judge will use in choosing their answer, which is a problem all games with such scoring mechanics share. I do not understand the appeal of playing a game about doing or saying things you think other people will like. If you enjoy that kind of thing, try socializing with some acquaintances over a nice dinner and winning their favor through actual conversation. You don’t need the arbitrary context of a board game.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb for you aspiring game designers out there: points in a game should never be directly assigned due to a player’s personal preference. If a player does want to positively influence another’s score for whatever reason, the game’s system should require that desire be expressed as a series of inputs that affect the possibility space of all players in an interesting way. What it should not do is give players the ability to look at each other and say “you get a point because reasons.”
Anyhow, seeing that we’ve meandered on over to the topic of game design, let’s try a fun experiment and attempt to fix Say Anything. First things first, let’s ditch the dopey questions and swap in some proper writing prompts. Here are a few off the top of my head:
- During your performance review, your boss notices your shirt’s on backwards. What do you say?
- Your greatest dream and worst nightmare just had a child. What does it look like?
- You stumble upon objective proof that you’re stupid. What do you do next?
I don’t know about you, but I’m already less embarrassed at this imaginary version of Say Anything. Next, instead of one player sitting out each round, let’s have everyone answer the prompt. Afterward, we’ll shuffle up all the answers and pass them back out so everyone has someone else’s answer (unless they happen to get dealt their own). One by one, the players read aloud the answer they’ve been dealt, and the other players vote on whose they think it is. Scoring then happens as a result of the votes, not some “player chooses” nonsense.
Hmm, I think I went a little overboard. That sounds nothing like Say Anything. Oh well, I guess the only way to fix the game is to just design a new one entirely. And yes, I’m sure there are a million problems with the game I just made up. That’s not the point. The point is that to turn Say Anything into a game I’d actually want to play you’d have to change everything about it. I’d certainly play my imaginary party game over it any day.
Sorry, let’s wrap this up. Say Anything sucks. The only social function I can imagine it having is as the icebreaking activity on a weekend retreat. In that context, I’d rank it somewhere below Two Truths And A Lie. Say Anything is the party game at its worst — brainless, awkward, and unfunny. I have wrested not a single yuk from its wretched confines, not even one of derision. It is a black hole of fun, well-wishes, and human warmth. How ironic that the designer plastered his story of feeling trapped at a soul-sucking job all over the rule book of a game that makes me feel the same way.
Say Anything gets a rating of ONE out of FIVE, indicating it is WORTHLESS.