A hot affair review

It's pretty hard to go wrong, giving a board game to a geek to review. Especially when it's a geek who loves sex. So when I received "A Hot Affair" in the mail, I knew that Apollo and I were going to have a blast trying it out.

The game layout is pretty traditional. You've got your fold-in-half board, four sets of cards, a standard die, and two little stands. The game is designed for a couple, ie: two people only, so that's the number of stands you get. And as you're supposed to go around the board six times, there are little 'lifesavers' to slip over the stand each time you pass Go, to keep track (the phallic and yonic representations of these were not lost on either of us).

The squares on the board give you various options, and they ramp up in intensity the more times around the board you go. The first two rounds are Intimate (pink), followed by Passionate (purple) and Steamy (red). These confused us initially, as we both felt that purple was 'hotter' than red. Three of the lots of cards match with these colors, with the fourth set being Fantasy (Black), and for the end-game.

Having 'drink' squares was a good thing - Apollo and I both thoroughly needed the opportunity to quench our thirst as we worked our way through.  The 'dancing' square was less popular, although I was highly amused watching Apollo attempt to gyrate to the soundtrack from 'Don Juan de Marco' (which I'd put on for romantic atmosphere). The 'kissing' square was always appreciated, as was the 'massage' square.  The other square was the one for picking up a card - pink or purple or red depending on which round you were at.

The cards. These were ... interesting. Reading them, we discovered a few things about the aims of the game. Firstly, it was very heterocentrist, assuming that the players were a male and female couple. Not only did it have Hers and His options on each card, the very nature of the questions or actions suggested that the partner was of the opposite sex.  Secondly, it was quite straight-laced in its gender assumptions, the options implying that not only was the couple opposite-sexed, but that there's wasn't any previous inclination for gender-fluidity (ooh, how kinky, wearing your partners knickers!). Thirdly, the nature of many of the actions seemed to us to suggest that kink wasn't a part of standard play for them.

Overall, while we enjoyed ourselves (beer assisting in that endeavor), we both felt that this game would be more appealing to a relatively new couple, who were of the male/female dynamic, and reasonably vanilla.  Frankly, they'd get off on it more.