Playing The Field is a Q&A style card game from The Power Sisters. They sent me a copy and I recently I had the chance to play the game with my girlfriend.
Playing the Field contains four boxes of cards, labeled 1st Base, 2ndBase, etc. One player asks the other the question on the card. Some cards have physical cue’s to look for the see if the other person is uncomfortable or open to suggestion.
Overall, they did a good job with the questions, the majority are ones you’ve asked someone during the dating phase of a relationship. Questions are appropriate for each level. They start out the type of questions you would expect to be asked on a first date and progress well through the Home Run box. Having asked most of the questions of each other already, we found the 1st and 2nd base questions too basic, “What’s your favorite color” kind of softball questions. It’s only when you get to the Home Run box that cheeks begin to flush from questions such as “What is your favorite sexual position?”
The Power Sisters did a good job of designing the overall game and packaging. My girlfriend is a designer and she says the design is cute and well executed. The color illustrations are nice and overall the packaging is, well, fun. Whimsical comes to mind.
One thing we felt right off the bat is that the context of the game is awkward, when they are going for light and fun game for everyone. As someone who has been dating women in New York and Boston my entire life, there is no way I would pull out a deck of cards and start asking questions on the first date, let along the fourth. We were not sure when are you supposed to play. Are home Run questions supposed to be asked during foreplay? I’m sure all of this is answered in the rules, but who reads those?
I was expecting a real game where one person would win, like playing Uno, President or other card games. The lack of an endgame (forgetting about the Home Run) makes me think Playing The Field would be better suited as a book. Many of questions would be funnier when asked at a party.
Some questions appear repeated on different levels, or we had too much wine. Probably the latter.
The physical cue’s to look for when asking the questions are often repeated and too basic, it’s body language 101 and we found that neither of us exhibited a single one during the entire game. We had the most fun trying read each other’s body language when asking challenging questions.
The game came with a CD which contained no less than 18 files, including PDF’s of press releases, people playing the game and dating facts. A nice all-in-one marketing piece.
I would recommend Playing the Field to people who like asking and answering lots of generic questions. Nothing too risque here, just good clean getting-to-know-you fun.
Playing the Field retails for $24.99. Probably something that most dating sites could offer to members as part of the icebreaker package.
Come to think of it, adding questions like these to profiles or as part of the intial conversation would be worth investigating.
