Picture this: you’re walking down the street, minding your own business, when a strange old man jumps out at you from behind a tree. “Name a breakfast cereal!” he shrieks into your face. You stammer for a moment like an imbecile and cannot think of a single one, despite having inhaled a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch not one hour earlier. For reasons no one can explain, you eventually shout “Cereal!” at the top of your lungs. The strange man laughs at you and disappears in a cloud of purple smoke never to be seen again. Now let me ask you this: was that fun? Was that an enjoyable experience for you? If your answer is yes, then you might like Anomia, which essentially consists of an endless sequence of these types of situations (sans the strange old man). I, however, find this abrupt tip-of-your-tongue sensation rather unpleasant (as does pretty much everyone I know), so to build an entire game around it is, for me, a bit of a non-starter.
Anomia is a party game that doesn’t work with enough players to really be a party game and is mostly just exhausting and stressful. In it, players take turns drawing cards from one of two shuffled decks in the center of the table. Each card depicts a category and a symbol. Categories can be extremely broad (“Noun”) or quite narrow (“Bicycle Brand”), and the symbols are your standard arrangement of basic geometric shapes. Turns continue uneventfully until a player draws a card with a symbol matching another player’s. Immediately then a “Face-Off” occurs, and the two players must give a valid example of their opponent’s category. The first to do so — typically by sputtering out broken half-words until miraculously saying something passable — wins the other player’s card and adds it to their score pile. Cards are stacked on top of each other when drawn (that way each player only has one face-up card at a time), so winning cards in face-offs ends up revealing the card beneath them. This may cause a series of face-offs called a “Cascade”. Once all face-offs are resolved, the players go back to drawing cards. There are also wild cards that make different symbols count as the same for the purpose of inducing face-offs. This continues until the draw piles are empty, and the player with the most amount of cards in their score pile at that time wins.
It’s pretty obvious after just a single play of Anomia that it doesn’t really work well as a game. For starters, your scoring potential is 100% defined by random card draws. You can win every single face-off you’re in and still lose the game because another player just happened to be involved in more of them than you. Subsequent plays also greatly reward basic memorization as you can just use all the answers from the previous game, which totally undermines the game’s core concept. Now typically, I don’t care how “replayable” a game is (I word that, in my opinion, is ripe with misuse in board game criticism), but with short party games like this I would expect the game to not fall apart if played a few times with different social groups. To be fair, two unique decks are included to help alleviate this problem and you can play with an optional “No Repeats” rule, but those are band-aids over a flaw inherent in the game’s central design. After all, the “No Repeats” rule can only realistically stay in effect for a single game session, so if you were to play the game a week later the player with the best memory recall would still be at a large advantage. Also, Anomia has a surprisingly awkward cadence for a party game and requires constant nudging to keep it moving along. Unnoticed face-off triggers that have to be called out by a third party and difficulty remembering whose turn it is after chaotic cascades are both persistent annoyances. These are arguably “player problems” and not “game problems”, but I thought them worth mentioning anyway.
Even if your group doesn’t care about the memorization component of subsequent plays and is laser-focused on tracking face-offs and turn order, Anomia is still built around a mental sensation that is more annoying than fun. Sure, it can (and probably will) result in some laugh-out-loud funny moments — particularly under the influence of drink — but so can spinning around in circles until you can barely stand or holding phallic objects near your crotch. Should there be card games built around those ideas, too? (There are probably already several.) Not all conversational whoopsies or social humors are worth constructing games around, even amongst those that frequently result in yuks being had. The next time a friend of mine has a moment of cognitive flatulence and can’t think of the word “refrigerator” yes, it will probably make me laugh. But what it ain’t going to make me is interested in another game of Anomia.
Anomia gets a rating of TWO out of FIVE, indicating it is NOT RECOMMENDED.