Base price: $20.
2 – 8 players.
Play time: 25 – 45 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy from Hachette!
Logged plays: 2

Full disclosure: A review copy of Perfectly Imperfect was provided by Randolph / Hachette Boardgames.

I like the contrast of reviewing a solo game and a party game in the same week. It lets me contain multiudes while also being mysterious and puzzly, I guess? This against the last, say, two weeks solid of just EXIT games. I do love them, but changing things up is almost always a good thing for the site and for y’all. That said, there’s another EXIT Family game nearby and an Advent Calendar that I have to get through at some point, so there will be more puzzles in the imminent future. Plus, I’m trying to convince a friend that we should become nomadic-ish Escape Room Weirdos, since we’ve done about 40 or so at this point. More on that another time. Instead, let’s talk dating. People are dating, and they’re using apps to date, but they’re all sick of them. It’s the perfect overlap of capitalism and enshittification. An app won’t show you anyone you want to date, but if you give them $50 a month, they might. Now, you ask yourself, why would an app I’m paying money to ever want me to get into a relationship that causes me to stop paying them money? And you’ve now discovered perverse incentive structures. More on that another time as well. So leave the apps behind and let your friends figure out who you’d want to date with Perfectly Imperfect!

In Perfectly Imperfect, you’ve handed your phone to your friends and let them swipe for you instead. It’s the perfect way to address dating app fatigue and pretend like you’re not emotionally invested in the outcome. You don’t want to date; you just want to participate in dating app culture, and that’s what you tell yourself. Your therapist makes a “hmm” noise and writes in her notebook every time you bring this up. Your friends are all happy to swipe on your phone, so it all works out. What strange people are they going to recommend for you, and how will you react? Any chance you’ll find the one? Let’s find out!

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

Not a ton here, which is … kind of the way I’ve been gaming, lately. We’re working on it! More complex games will come!

Set out the scoring cards:

Next, give each player a set of player cards:

Shuffle the Profile Cards and set them aside:

You’re pretty much ready to go!

Gameplay

How to play Perfectly Imperfect? It’s pretty simple. You need to guess how your fellow players react to dating profiles!

Each round, one player will be the Dater. The player to their left draws three Profile Cards and reads them out to the group. Then, all players except the Dater choose their Perfect / Meh / Nope cards and assign them face-down to each profile. Each card must be played and can only be played on one Profile. Then, each player must place their Pretty Sure I Know This One card on whichever card they feel the most confident (or least concerned) about.

Once everyone’s done that, the Dater goes! They place their Perfect, Meh, and Nope cards and everyone sees how they did. If you matched the Dater on a profile, you get a point! If you placed your Pretty Sure I Know This One card on a correct guess, you get a bonus point! (You can max out at 4 points in a round.) The Dater scores the same as whichever player scored the most points.

Play until every player has been the Dater twice (with six+ players, have each player be the Dater once)! The player with the most points wins!

Player Count Differences

I think this is definitely a game that plays better with more people, as the core ethos of the game is about the discussion and the justification or dissection of players’ preferences. At three, I mean, you can still have a perfectly fun time, but you really want to have eight to see coalitions build and the occasional debate or argument emerge. If the discussion is popping off and people are here for it, well, then there’s no problem! The major worry is that if you’re seeing things start to drag, you may want to take an off-ramp early lest folks get restless. I think it’s probably worth it to play with more folks for the extra conversation and debate though! If you’re not sure, maybe stick to five or six players. I think you’ll max out at ten rounds with five players, and after that you go down to each player taking one turn as the Dater before the game ends.

Strategy

I think this is another one of those games where if you’re trying to get “strategic” about this, you might be bringing the wrong energy to the game. I think some party games have a lot more “here’s how you Win” vibes to them, but this isn’t really for that, to the point that I sometimes question why there are points at all. I’m not terribly competitive, so, that’s probably where I’m coming from. Here, you’re more trying to figure out who your friends are most interested in dating or swiping right on. The strategy for that is mostly reading and seeing if your friends react to any cards when they’re read, I suppose?

Go in with a focus on having fun and clowning your friends for their bad tastes in romantic partners, rather than trying to outsmart people to get point cards; you’ll have more fun that way.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• I like the art style! It’s pleasant in a lightly-kitschy way, which I like.
• Pretty easy to pick up and play. You just read the cards and then decide how your friend would respond, and then you have to say which one you’re most confident about.
• There’s a certain level of intuitive to how the game works, as it’s pretty similar in style to some classic party games, which is nice. It’s effectively similar to Date / Marry / Kill or Kiss / Marry / Kill (or whatever y’all call it), but then you just have the “Dater” explain who’s guesses were correct. There are a lot of games that follow this format in some way, where a player rates things and you have to guess the rating, but this is hitting at a very good time given the general culture of Dating App Fatigue I see among my friends and peers.
• Feels pretty easy to expand. I imagine there are plenty of brands that would want to tie into this or just other writers or folks who would be interested. That said, you could get weird with it and do a like, Lord of the Rings tie-in or something. Not my scene but I have some friends that would be very excited about that.

Mehs

• I think the card margin on the front is a little small on the player cards; we had a few instances where players got confused as to which were theirs. I think just having a thicker margin of the back design would make the cards appear more distinct on a cursory glance. We solved this by just consistently playing our cards in certain rows, which also helped.
• The second round of gameplay isn’t super critical; it’s just one of those strictly-by-the-book adds to give the game a somewhat standard length. You can play one round, you can play fifteen rounds, if you want; it’s the general party game rule. Most people just play until they’re done, and so I always feel a bit weird when there’s a game-mandated specific set of rounds, unless the extra round changes the format in some useful or interesting way. I think Oink is particularly guilty of just “play three rounds” as a way to amortize out some of the randomness. Here, the second round is identical to the first, so not much changes.
• The box is an odd shape, especially given the contents. Could probably make the box half of its size, which I always find a bit annoying. It’s already weirdly tall for its width, so to open the box and find it half-empty is frustrating as a consumer. Having the insert have a bit wider of an opening would also let you store the cards in a more convenient way.

Cons

• Maybe I’m just a prude, but 16+ feels somewhat generous for some of the cards. They’re not sexually explicit, per se, but some are pretty heavy-handed on the innuendo or just directly asking for nudes. I’d lean that towards a very light R-rating, but that’s just me.
• The character voice feels pretty consistent, so even though the characters are all over the place, they don’t necessarily feel varied. This one’s a bit tougher to explain. The characters are all different, yes, but they have a similar voice, so they end up feeling like they have a consistent through-line that makes them feel less distinct from each other. I think that’s also partially a consequence of only having text to represent them, whereas other “dating” games (Dream Crush, for instance) go the route of a photo only and then some randomly-assigned in-game text. I wonder if having more people write cards would make it feel more distinct for me, but I have no idea how many people wrote the initial set.

Overall: 6 / 10

Overall, I think Perfectly Imperfect is fine! It could be that I’m a bit worn out on the dating app life, myself, but there’s a something to be said about a party game that lets you better understand your friends’ preferences and interests. It’s also a humorous way to get to know new people. I think we found that we really enjoyed it the most when we played a starting warm-up round and then played a “round” where we just flipped the cards and played our “Perfect / Meh / Nope” cards and then discussed. After that, we played a final round, but that’s party games for you. We were just feeling things out. As for the actual game I’m reviewing, yeah, I wouldn’t necessarily say I was blown away but also I’m not particularly mad about it. It’s a fine way to pass an evening, but I didn’t really feel like the profiles resonated with me or my group that much. They felt … similar in a way that’s hard to explain effectively, like seeing the same person A/B test their profile for different audiences in a few cases. I appreciated that they were pretty effectively gender-neutral, but beyond that, we had several “we would Nope all of these if we could” rounds. Sometimes they just don’t match up, and that’s okay! The format is simple enough and easy to pick up and play, which is nice, but I think I prefer my party games to get a little bit deeper in either complexity or letting me read my friends for filth. I wouldn’t be surprised if an expansion showed up with more adult profiles or more variety, though I think a Guest Writer Pack of some kind could be fun (maybe partnering with something like The Ick for Brand Synergy). But the game did what it was supposed to, which was inspire some conversation and a few laughs as we played. Am I chomping at the bit to dive back in? No. Did I have a bad time? Also no. But I could see a number of folks genuinely loving this, especially if you’re already used to roasting your friends’ dating preferences and want to dig in a bit more. If that’s you and your group, you’ve been on the apps too long, or you just want to see who your friends might date, you may enjoy Perfectly Imperfect!

Looking for more party games for your next gathering? Check out my Social and Party Games Hub for some recommendations!

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