Eric Saunders

Would You Rather...? the Hilarious Game for All Ages by Julian Flanders is a wonderful collection of options for the game of WYR?

First, I have seen some similar books that were focused on a narrow area, which is great if you're playing with people who also really like that particular area. What I like about this volume is that it is broken into sections that will allow you to change the type of question periodically while playing.

Like any such collection, some questions aren't really applicable for certain people and it is just easier to skip them rather than modify them on the fly. For instance, at my age, options that involve a fellow student or a teacher doesn't really work, though I could pretend to be my younger self and guess what I would have answered. This is, I think, a positive rather than a negative of the book. There are a lot of questions here and it is nice to have some that will seem to speak more directly to your circumstances.

The hypothetical I mentioned above where I might pretend to be my younger self brings me to a use of this book that I found a while back with a similar book. If you write, whether for publication or strictly for yourself (or somewhere in between) you can use many of these as writing prompts for some freewriting. I usually use one or the other of the options, though if they might be related I will work them both in. I find this serves to help my creativity since so many of the options are far-fetched. Whether I work toward explaining or work toward creating a scenario, I enjoy having a starting point that is out of the ordinary for some casual freewriting time.

Anyway, back to the intended purpose. While I have played this as a game of sorts, I have some friends who simply like to do a few of these when we are sitting around, debate our answers, and even add more what-ifs based on what we opted for. Yes, I am an odd fellow, but my friends are odd also so it all works out.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (altro)