LogFAQs > #932981845

83. Anomia (2010)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Party game, pattern recognition, reflexes
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 20 minutes
Experience: 5+ plays over 3+ sessions (2017-2018) with 5-6 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), 31/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player has a stack of face-down cards. The cards have odd shapes on them along with a category ("'60s movie star"). On your turn, you flip over a card from your deck onto your face-up pile, and if the shape matches someone else's shape, you immediately have to state something of the matching player's category ("Marilyn Monroe!"). The player who says the other person's first takes a point (card) from the original winner.

Experience - This game ranked super-high for me when I ranked it, largely because my plays of it were entirely concentrated between late 2017 and early 2018. I haven't played it in coming-on two years now, but I have very fond memories.

Design - I love real-time games like this that put people into the pressure cooker and turn their brains to mush. Anomia is designed essentially to make people flail and shout and point, and that is exactly what it does best. You constantly need to be on edge in case your card is shown, and if the pace is fast enough, you'll be thinking of "in case I match with X" words constantly. Due to the way card reveals works, it's possible to set off a chain when a lost card reveals another card that matches. And you might get to see how quickly your friends turn unexpectedly vulgar.

That said, Anomia is hardly a tight design. "Patterns match, race" and "think of something" are both super-fun mechanics to me, but they're not exactly original, and Anomia doesn't bring a ton more to the table.

One particularly disappointing artifact of the game's design is that it's technically possible to go an entire game without matching anyone, and that it's a virtual guarantee that the duels are not equally distributed. Scores aren't important in games like Anomia, but the unequal opportunities presented in Anomia make that exercise particularly nonsensical. It's certainly competitive and contentious, but because each round is almost independent and the duration doesn't form a coherent arc, it's also easy to say that Anomia isn't particularly game-y. So as it grows more distant in memory, it sinks more.

Future - Anomia is really fun, but not really the type of game I'd get as a hobby gamer. Again, the group will matter, but if it comes to the table again I will be glad - but I miss the memory of that time of my life more than desiring to play the game again.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness