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Tag: Anomia

** Anomia (2010) – Andrew Innes

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…