Say Anything product reviews

This, like a high-stakes game of poker, isn't always about playing the game. It's about knowing your opponents, what they think, and how to play to them. But husband/wife teams should take great care, because all it can take to start a war is one 'obvious' answer that didn't show up!

The rules were fairly simple, but we had to make a few assumptions, and learn a few mistakes as we played. First off is that a player should NOT participate in the round they ask the question in - no writing down answers, no bidding on answers, nothing. Ask, use the Select-o-Matic 5000, and then reveal. Just that... otherwise you have a rash of copycat answers and the game is a draw.

Another thing is that the points limit is a VERY smart move. Otherwise, it is possible to suddenly go from last place to first with one well thought out answer... not necessarily a bad thing really, but by having the limit the game becomes far more challenging.

My only slight gripe is that the game was over far too quickly, even with 5 players... The limitation is simple - the scorecard only has 12 columns... 12 questions. A larger scorecard would give the game a much better entertainment level... so if you are crafty, you can make your own scorecard and play by time limit, first to a particular score or a fixed number of rounds - your choice.

Because the target player age brackets starts at 13, this is one that the little kids won't be able to play... but probably the biggest factor is having all the players either from the same family (so having a shared knowledge base of each other), or of a similar age group (to allow for comparable opinions/trivia). Having adults and kids from different families playing made for a few 'bad rounds' due to lack of any 'common ground' at all - this is highlighted by questions that call for either very personal opinions or an in-depth knowledge of the asker's life.

Overall, this was fun, and a second game was in the wings until we realised we were reaching our time limit and some players had to depart. This is one we are going to unpack, modify, and play again *our* way and really see how well we know our friends and fellow players.

Overall this game was fairly enjoyable, it did create a lot of laughs seeing some of the answers that people gave to the questions asked.

However one major fault I found was that some of the rules where a little unclear and it took a few goes to really "get" what we were doing in the game.

We did work out that to score the most points you really needed to "play the player", figure out what sort of answer they would most likely pick as their favourite. Whether or not this was the intention of the game I'm still honestly not sure. If it is then this is probably more a game to be played amongst those who know each other versus as a "getting to know you" type of game.

I also found it was a little short, I felt we could have gone a few more rounds, particularly by the time we were getting the hang of it.

It was a bit of fun and I would play it again but probably not one I'd add to our permanent collection unless it was on special.