Oh, hello there, Cosmo. If I'd known you were coming, I would have prepared the pool... with sharks. This game is geared toward people with very very traditional ideas about gender and sex, especially if your idea of kinky is any sex that isn't missionary with the lights off. If you're a fan of Cosmopolitan Magazine and you think it gives great sex advice (protip: It doesn't) then this game is perfect for you; mostly because a large portion of the "Kinky tips" are pulled directly from it's pages.

The game is very simple. Once a week, scratch a card, do what it says. There is no winner. Seriously, no one wins. I suppose you could substitute them in as the cards for another game, but then it would take you forever to play, because half of them are only very loosely related to sex or kink. One of the "for him" cards says, paraphrased, "Buy her a gift card and send her shopping for lingerie. Special requests are never off limits." I'll try to touch on the problems with that later.

The cards are really a pain to scratch; they require more intensive work than really necessary and make a huge mess. You should definitely do it over a garbage can. They are fairly sturdy cards, however, and will probably last as long as you don't accidentally scratch the words off of them. They're actually kind of pretty. I'll probably white out the fronts, write my own suggestions, and use them because they're pretty.

As far as looks in general go, these cards are attractive to look at. Unfortunately, they present a lot of problems if you aren't a big fan of gender stereotypes. Are you a woman who doesn't like shopping? A man who doesn't feel like spending the entire day making sexual innuendos at your mate? If I wasn't reading the "For Him" and "For Her" on the backs of the cards, most of it would just be hilariously bad advice. (Ex. "Turn house chores into a pleasure exchange system. Vacuuming = oral pleasure. Dusting = 10 minute massage. Taking the garbage out = a sexy surprise. Doing chores in the nude earns extra pleasure points.") But that was a "For Him" card, because everyone knows men don't do chores without being bribed into it, and everyone knows women don't want sex, they just want "their man" to do the chores. Yech! The only way I can see this working is if you're in a full time service oriented D/s relationship. The sad part is, I can't figure out who is supposed to benefit from most of these. Maybe people who are really into orgasm denial?

Another wonderful one was "It's your turn to surrender to your partner. Put on your best submissive game face and let her dominant bedroom persona fulfill your every fantasy." Because men must be coddled, submissive men are just "putting on a game face," and it's all about the man's fantasy, again, women don't have fantasies. I'll give them points, they occasionally acknowledge female pleasure, but typically in these cards it seems to be all about the male gaze.

The cards that aren't gender stereotypes are so hilariously obvious that it isn't worth it, with such helpful hints as (paraphrased) "pleasure him without using oral or intercourse", "Do it in front of a mirror/under a mirrored ceiling", and "Have phone sex."

When the game arrived I was excited and apprehensive. My lover came over and we pulled out the cards. We scratched one and then stared at it in perplexed amusement. He was supposed to spend the entire day answering every question I asked him with a sexual scenario? That sounded both irritating and not very conductive to getting it on. So we scratched another, and another, and another. Finally, after about 15 cards that we either laughed at or made faces over, we got a good one. Unfortunately, it was also something we'd already thought to do on our own. Another 6 cards later, a pattern started to emerge. Roughly a third of the cards were rewordings of other cards with "Him" switched for "Her." Finally, we got another reasonable one, but the instructions specifically stated to for him spank me "three times, very gently," which, for me, is nothing but a cruel, cruel tease, so that might have been sufficiently kinky. All in all, most of the cards were a flop, and it equaled out to not very many nights at all of pleasure that I wouldn't consider particularly kinky.

The little silk bag they came in is now home to my D&D dice.