My Favourite Things Review – Your Opinion Matters

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens have nothing on your favourite wizards, childhood injuries and catastrophic oil spills. Forget the famous melody My Favourite Things the card game is a personality test in disguise.

This little trick taker will reveal far more about your friends than you ever asked for. You will be ranking everything from colours of the rainbow to the best cartoon characters, then trying to guess those ranks in a simple game with a simple twist. It is a quirky idea wrapped in an even quirkier package. But how does it play, and is it worth your time? Let’s find out.

How to play

My Favourite Things is all about the setup and the cards. Each “card” is really a sleeve that holds a backing card numbered one to five, or a broken heart. Where the one to five are for ranking your top five favourite things of a specific category (created by your peers) the broken heart represents your least favourite of said category.

Starting each round, all players write a topic on their topic card. This can be anything you can think of from super heroes to fingers on your hand. The weirder the topic the better. Although if you’re finding yourself struggling to come up with one, there are plenty (and I mean plenty) of categories to choose from in the box as well.

So get creative with your topics because that is where most of the magic happens. At our table we ended up ranking favourite teachers, most powerful wizards, and even man-made disasters. There’s a real delight in watching your friends struggle with categories they never expected to face.

Once you’ve come up with the perfect topic, hand over your topic card along with the rest of the cards you started with to a person sitting next to you. You’ll receive a topic and cards as well, so start filling them in with the your five favourite things matching the topic. Plus the one thing you can’t stand. After you’re done, give the cards a shuffle before handing them back to the player. Ensuring that no one can see the number (or broken heart) on the backing.

Now the trick-taking begins. Not sure what that means? Then quickly catch up by reading this quick visual intro to the genre. However, this is a much lighter version of the genre where everyone is trying to play their most liked card from their hands. Except, nobody has a clue what value of the card is. Only the topic that was given, and the rest of the cards in your hand.

When everyone has a card on the table, players pull up the card showing its ranking underneath. The player who gets closest to rank one wins the trick, with ties going to whoever played their card first. As mentioned, there is a twist though. If someone plays a rank one card, while another player plays their broken heart card, the second player wins the hand. Although love conquers all, in My Favourite Things powerful hate trumps love every day of the week.

After a few rounds filled with laughs and very questionable rankings, you total how many tricks each person won to see who knows their friends the best.

More laughs than strategy

Out of all the games I have played, My Favourite Things stands out as a completely unique experience. I will never forget the round where the following cards hit the table: candy bananas for favourite sweet, Henry Cavill for male actors, trains for modes of transportation, and the BP Oil Spill for man made disasters.

You would think candy bananas would have taken an easy win, since they are my favourite type of candy. I can destroy a whole bag in one sitting without shame… OK maybe a little shame. But the BP Oil Spill was my friend’s least favourite man made disaster, which meant it trumped everything else and took the round.

As bizarre as this sounds, and believe me just typing it out is causing my brain to scrunch up like a piece of paper. This is a perfect snapshot of how weird and wonderful My Favourite Things can be. You stare at the cards on the table trying to puzzle out where you would rank them, then immediately realise everyone else will see them in completely different ways.

This clash of categories is also why we kept laughing through our plays. The comparisons are so ridiculous that your brain short circuits while trying to make sense of them. Yet when the numbers on the cards are revealed, you’ll find yourself nodding along as though it made perfect sense all along.

All of these rankings feed directly into the conversations that spring up. You question each other’s rankings, debate opinions you never knew anyone held, and hear the strange logic behind every choice. You learn a surprising amount about the other players while bouncing off wild prompts that push everyone into unfamiliar territory.

Speaking of those prompts, My Favourite Things leans heavily on your group coming up with good ones. They need to be interesting and they need to spark answers that are just as interesting (a fun one that came up in our plays was childhood injuries). The trouble is that the little trick taking game sitting underneath all this ranking is extremely light, and it runs out of steam fast.

On quieter rounds the simplicity becomes impossible to ignore. There is not much to think about. You are always trying to play your best card, with the only minor decision of when to reveal your favourite and least favourite options. It is so straightforward that my eyes would drift to my board game shelf as I wondered what we might play next.

That leaves My Favourite Things in a tricky spot to recommend. If your group has the creativity to keep producing fun topics and the energy to riff on each other’s choices, then do not hesitate, this is absolutely your game. But many groups, like mine, may not have the consistent creativity needed to hide the very thin layer of gameplay sitting underneath.