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…
If the potential to assist players in committing suicide by cop was the primary factor in the assessment of board games, Ca$h ‘N Guns would be the greatest ever made. Alas that is not the case, so I am compelled to express the depths of which I despise the embarrassment of its experience. This is a game that’s appeal hinges entirely on a single flimsy gimmick: pointing foam guns at each other. There is nothing else to say about it. If you think pointing foam guns at your friends for a half hour sounds like a hoot, you will probably like Ca$h ‘N Guns. Personally, I think it sounds like hell (apparently not always though, something made me buy the game after all…). Maybe if the game built around this gimmick wasn’t shamefully rudimentary and uninteresting I’d feel differently, but I mean of course it is — this is a game about pointing foam guns at each other. Ca$h ‘N Guns is a high concept, low effort flub that fails in every way to be expressive of its theme and has so little going for it I’m surprised it even exists, much less has a second edition. The first time my friends and I played Ca$h ‘N Guns was such a dismal experience I’m reluctant to drudge up its memory. Every single person at the table loathed it; we didn’t even finish the game. To this date, it’s one of the most viscerally negative reactions to a new game I’ve seen. But why? What about…
Betrayal At House On The Hill is one of the first board games I ever loved. It is also one of the first I ever hated. Like so many modern board game neophytes, with maybe a game or two of Dominion and Catan under my belt, my first impression of Betrayal At House On the Hill was one of delight and wonder at its seemingly infinite possibilities. The idea that a game’s objectives and victory conditions could be different every time it was played was mind-blowing. My friends and I played it many times over the first year or so I owned it, alongside a steady diet of titles from an increasingly wide selection of other games I’d been acquiring at a somewhat embarrassing rate. We began noticing something odd. We enjoyed every other game we tried more than Betrayal, aside from the rare massive whiff (which will remain nameless until I review those as well). Fast-forward roughly six years, and oh how tastes change. To say that I now consider Betrayal At House On the Hill to be a bad game would be a massive understatement. It is abysmal. Awful in every regard. A masters class unto itself in how not to make a game. The illusion it had cast me under has long since faded away, and it is abundantly clear that the true nature of its sprawling, open-ended design stems not from ambition, vision, or cogency — but simple ineptitude. When I dislike a game and am collecting my thoughts on it, I always spend a decent…