Love it. Hate it. Be Opinionated!
The game where giving your opinion is everything.
72 cards. Every card asks: “How do you feel about X?” Answer with love or hate first. Explain why after.
Pick a card from any colour. The colour is the topic, so you choose how deep the game goes.
Love or hate. Say it before you explain it. Your gut answers first. That's the point.
Now defend it. Why do you love picking up the bill? Why do you hate surprises?
Everyone at the table answers the same question. Watch the room engage.
The back of every card reads LOVE one way up and HATE the other. As you play, the cards get sorted, and by the end the table shows a map of your relationship.
Everything you both love. Your common ground in a pile you can hold.
Everything you both hate, weirdly, just as bonding.
The opinions only you hold. The most interesting pile on the table. This is where the second conversation starts.
No score. No notebook. No app. There's no winner. The game is done when the conversation doesn't need it anymore. That's the win.
Every colour is a topic, and every topic has its own intensity. Light ones keep the game breathing. Heavy ones take it somewhere real. The mix is engineered card by card.
The box carries nine rainbow lines for nine topics, but only eight decks ship inside. The ninth is Intimacy: an 18+ deck, sold separately, for when the table can handle it. Every box quietly asks the same question: what's the ninth line? And the lines themselves run to every side of the box on purpose, because that's what the conversations do: they go everywhere.
Take turns drawing. Decide, explain, compare, stack. Built for two people who want a real conversation.
One card, everyone answers in turn. Watch who loves and who hates. The room splits and the debate starts itself.
Think you know each other through and through? Draw a card and answer for the other person. Find out how well you really know them.
Light topics only. See someone's actual personality instead of their work face: in onboarding, team days, even job interviews.
Grandparents and grandkids, parents and teens. You know your family, but do you know them as people?
The more modes players discover, the longer the deck lives. New modes cost nothing to add. They're rules, not cards.
The love-or-hate rule isn't a gimmick. There's real psychology behind why one silly rule makes conversations so much better.
Kahneman describes two modes: System 1 (fast, gut) and System 2 (slow, careful). System 2 is lazy. It only works when forced. Small talk never forces it. Opinionated! does: your gut picks love or hate, then the mandatory “why” drags real thinking into the room. Researchers call this a cognitive forcing function.
Tetlock's research shows people reason harder, more carefully and more self-critically when they must justify their opinion to others, strongest when they don't yet know what the others think. That's exactly one round of this game.
Head-on debate about disagreements doesn't reduce hostility. Positive personal conversations between people who disagree do. Opinionated! creates real disagreement over stakes so low (spoilers, fast food) that opposite views stay fun. It trains the muscle polarization has weakened: disagreeing with someone and still liking them.
Vol. 1 goes to print when we hit 100 pre-orders.
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