Game Review: Say Anything

By W. Eric Martin
June 23, 2008

Publisher: North Star Games
Designers: Dominic Crapuchettes & Satish Pillalamarri
Players: 3-8
Ages: 13+
Playing Time: 35 minutes
Release Date: August 2008 (although available at Origins in June)

Version played: Production copy
Times played: Seven, three times with 3, twice with 5 and once each with 6 & 7

To the untrained eye, designing a party game seems simple: Create or inspire situations in which the players will interact and have fun.

Alas, this is easier said than done. Earlier in 2008, Ted Cheatham and I reviewed Party Pooper, a new game from Out of the Box, and we agreed that the game doesn’t work as intended. To recap the rules: Each turn, one player is the host and reads a card with some unusual situation such as swimming in icy water. Depending on a die roll, the host wants to identify which player is the least likely to do this activity (i.e. the party pooper) or the most likely (i.e. the party animal). On the count of 3, all players point at the player whom they think the host will point at, scoring a point if they guess correctly.

The design of Party Pooper wants to drive players to interact, to learn surprising things about one another, but the game falls flat because it’s nothing more than finger-pointing. Someone points at you, and the only response is, “Oh, you think I’d want to star in a rodeo. Well you’re wrong.” Instead of kicking off conversations, the game grounded all talk by directing it along a yes/no path.

Riddle Me This

North Star Games’ Say Anything uses a similar “guess which target the active player will choose” mechanism, but before that perfunctory step comes an important element that’s missing from Party Pooper: the creative challenge. Instead of a flat yes/no, pooper/animal dichotomy, each of the players (aside from the judge) creates her own answer to a question.

More importantly, each question card features five questions, allowing the judge to tailor the game to those around him. If I’m meeting new people and want to see what their musical tastes are like, I can choose “What’s the best song of all time?” (For the record, it’s The Orb’s extended remix of Meat Beat Manifesto’s “Radio Babylon,” a 13-minute masterpiece that I’ve listened to at least a hundred times. It hits me the same way that tea does according to this quote attributed to Gladstone: “If you are cold, tea will warm you; If you are too heated, it will cool you; If you are depressed, it will cheer you; If you are excited, it will calm you.” Just typing this has made me put the song on one more time. I’ll be back in a few...) Or perhaps I’ll go with “Which movie should never have been made?” (Answer: “Dirty Dancing” with “Superman IV” being a close runner-up.)

If we’re playing late at night or are just in a goofier mood, I’d go with “What’s the most annoying thing about being a man?” (Answer: Women! Wait, probably all the wars and killing. No, on second thought, it’s definitely women.) Or perhaps “What would be the coolest thing to do with $100 million lottery jackpot?” (Answer: Have a custom themed version of Dominion printed with plastic cards.)

You have the joy that comes from creating a good answer – with “good” being open to interpretation, of course – and the joy of seeing what others write. Dominic Crapuchettes says that this aspect of the game play was present from the start. “When we think about designing games, we think about what people like to do. Say Anything is modeled after conversations you have in college when you’re with friends in a dorm room or bar and arguing over things like who’s the best athlete.”

While the game play grew out of memories of college BS sessions, Crapuchettes and co-designer Satish Pillalamarri also used what they learned from their previous release, the award-winning Wits & Wagers. “We looked deeply at what made the game fun,” says Crapuchettes, “and the social interaction was one of the elements that people really enjoyed, the social aspect of seeing what other people know and what they don’t have a clue about.”

But whereas Wits & Wagers features only questions that have a numerical answer, such as estimating the height of the Empire State Building, Say Anything gives topics that will draw more passion from the players because the answers don’t exist until they create them.

Someone Has To Win, Right?

Say Anything uses a simple scoring system: After each player lays out her answer (with duplicates being replaced at the judge’s discretion), the judge secretly chooses one of the answers. Each player then places two colored tokens on any of the answers, including her own, splitting the tokens over two answers if desired. After the judge reveals his pick, anyone who placed a token on that answers scores one point, as does the player who wrote the answer. The judge scores one point for each token on an answer up to a maximum of three.

The judge position rotates after each round, and after a certain number of rounds, the player with the most points wins.

Winning, however, is beside the point because the fun comes from creating a good answer and seeing how people react to it. Yes, if I know the judge, then I have a better chance of writing an answer that he might choose, but where’s the fun in that? And depending on the question, you’ll have no idea what the right answer is anyway because the subject has never previously arisen during conversation. “What would be the most fun thing to throw off a tall building?” I answered “Oprah Winfrey” because her name had come up earlier in the evening and I thought I’d get a rise out of people. “What would be the worst thing to scream in church?” As judge, I went with “Touchdown!!”

In the four games that I’ve played, answers have tended to start tame, then drift south, as it were. Imagine, if you will, possible unprintable answers to the question “What’s the worst thing to have in your mouth?” and you’ll know what I mean. Says Pillalamarri, “That’s just the beauty of the human mind.” Given a cue, you take off in all kinds of directions, not all of them pretty.

My game groups’ taste for the scatological, if you’ll pardon the phrase, resulted largely from players choosing the wilder and more open-ended questions and feeling comfortable enough to, ahem, say anything. Says Crapuchettes, “When you play with test groups like parents, they pick questions that are more academic or self-revealing. The game has a more serious feel with that group. We wanted to the game to mold to the groups playing it.”

Along those lines, if you are trying to play the judge and get inside his head, the nature of the questions levels the competition between young and old. In one game with an eleven-year-old, which stayed mostly cleaner than the others, answers would tend to be something that she could relate to, while still trying to be funny.

The components of Say Anything are fine, but nothing new. The wipe boards and dry erase pens have held up for four games with no permanent marks. The judge’s Select-o-Matic 5000 tool is chintzy, and the arrow that points to the chosen answer comes out too easily, but it functions well enough.

Who Are These Guys?

Unlike Eurogame publishers, North Star Games has been pushing for mainstream distribution of its titles, something it achieved in 2007 when Wits & Wagers was picked up by Target. Sales have been strong enough, says Pillalamarri, that the game will receive more prominent shelf placement in the future. “We’re getting increased support because they think the game has potential.”

Even better, a number of Target stores will test out Say Anything in mid-August, bringing another designer game to mainstream buyers. Say Anything even goes so far as to include a primer as to what the term “designer game” means and why buyers should care. “I think the quality of games that come out in the mass market is reflective of the fact that we haven’t cultivated a great group of game designers,” says Crapuchettes. “No person on the street could identify a game designer whereas they all know authors and band members and directors. What idiot is going to devote his life to something if he’s not going to be paid well or recognized for it?”

As for future plans from North Star, as Crapuchettes and Pillalamarri work towards global recognition, include family editions of Say Anything and Wits & Wagers. This latter title will be simplified to eliminate the gambling and payout odds as well as the ordering of answers, two aspects that gamers tackled easily while mainstream buyers stumbled.

Also, says Crapuchettes, “three years from now I’ll be putting out a Eurogame.” Not only that, but ideally one that achieves mainstream acceptance on the level of Wits & Wagers, which is sold in the U.S. where Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride have yet to appear. My calendar is already marked for 2011, Dominic – now you just have to deliver!

Update, June 26: I realized only after posting this review that I had neglected to include the number of players in each game. All of the above was based on games with 5-7 players.

I’ve since played Say Anything three times with only three players (one of whom had played previously), and as you might expect with a party game, the game is less involving and veering toward the pointless. With three players, the active player sees only two answers, and the non-active players still have two chips to divvy among those two answers. Scores rise almost equally because you have a better shot of guessing the chosen answer – and if you’re stumped as to what the judge might think, you can divide your chips to score at least one point anyway.

What’s worse, the game with three became more about putting down an answer that you think the judge might choose as you had a greater chance of being chosen. Now you might think the point of the game is to write an answer that the judge will choose, and you’re not wrong – but that’s not what I enjoyed about the game. I liked writing funny answers and laughing at what other players wrote.

Our solution for games #2 & 3 was for everyone to take two answer cards and one additional chip. This gave everyone the opportunity to push themselves and not settle for the reasonable answer instead of the outrageous one. The scoring also veered away from balance since you had more chances of being wrong as the guesser and of scoring zippo as the judge. While this idea might work if you’re pinched for players and desperate to play a party game – say, if you’re attempting to provide a more well-rounded review of Say Anything for a game news website – but ideally you either pull together a big crowd or play something else.

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