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.
Why do you love picking up the bill? Why do you hate surprises?
Everyone at the table answers the same question. That's when it gets interesting.
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 one pile.
Everything you both hate. Somehow just as bonding.
The cards only you love.
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. Every deck is mixed so the game doesn't stay in one place.
The box has nine lines running over every side, because that's how these conversations go: all over the place. Each line is a different subject. The standard box includes eight. The ninth is Intimacy, sold separately.
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?
Make up your own. The deck doesn't change, only the rules do.
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.
People are drawn to others who share their opinions, but not equally. Shared rare opinions pull harder than shared common ones, and the effect gets stronger the rarer the opinion is. Everyone loves pizza, so agreeing about it tells you nothing. Finding out you both hate the beach is actual information about each other.
We crowdfund Vol. 1 when we reach 100 sign ups.