Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #138885 in Toys & Games
• Brand: Pressman

Customer Reviews

Therapy, the game
One of the best games I have ever played. You learn a lot about people. Most of my friends want to know where I bought the game. I even used it at a church retreat. So much fun.

Therapy: Spending some time on the couch
Therapy is a party game. It's also pretty old - it came out over 20 years ago.

Let me say right off the bat that I had a good time playing Therapy. While the core gameplay is deeply flawed, the game itself is a fun time, and with people who don't care about winning, you should enjoy yourself.

The game board is sectioned off into 6 distinct parts, each a different color. Each part represents a different phase of life.

Each player is both therapist and patient. During your turn, you take the roll of a patient. You take your game piece (a colored couch), and move it 2d6 spaces clockwise. There are a number of different types of squares you can land on, and these determine what happens during your turn.

If you land on a "Therapy" square, the person whose couch is that color takes the top card from the Therapy deck and reads it to you. It might be something like "Which of these was the most traumatic event in your childhood: a) your first dentist visit, b) your first dance with a member of the opposite sex, or c) your first day at school?". You then write down your answer secretly on a piece of paper. Your "therapist" (the person with the couch of that color) then tries to guess which answer you picked. If he guesses correctly, then your therapy session is successful and you get to put a peg in your couch to indicate that you've completed that color. The person who gets all their pegs and then passes the "Finish" square wins the game.

As you can see, this is the part where the gameplay is "deeply flawed". Your therapist is the one who guesses your answer, and you gain the benefit from his correct answer! So what incentive does he have to answer correctly? All he has to do to keep you from getting points is to do the opposite of what he should be doing, per the game instructions. It benefits him if he does so, since it keeps points away from you. And what if everyone does it? The game devolves into . . . no fun.

So, during a Therapy session, you can't play this game to win. If you do, you ruin the game. You must do your earnest best to help another player get points.

There are other ways to score your little couch pegs. The most common type of space on the board is the "Insight" space. When a player lands here, he has to answer a multiple choice question correctly. Most of the time these are "True/False" questions, but sometimes they'll throw a choice of three in there to switch it up. If you answer the question correctly, you get the peg associated with the color of the square that you're on.

There are a couple other types of squares, but they just add even more randomness to the game.

As the game plays out, it's fun. You'll get to talking about people's past experiences. For example, I'd guessed that Barry's most traumatic experience of the set of three provided above was the dance. That wasn't so though - he'd answered "dentist". He went on to explain that when he was a kid, his father wanted to make a man out of him, and so he took him to an old military dentist to have him work on some cavities. The dentist didn't give him any Novocain, however, and Barry experienced quite a bit of pain.

You'll also have True Colors-esque "rate yourself" questions. The question might be "On a scale of 1 to 10, how strongly would you rate yourself on the trait of feeling guilty?". So you might answer a 2, but your Therapist would guess of you that you would say 7. This kind of perception conflict will raise interesting discussions, and even pointed disputes.

Another aspect of the game is that since it was made back in the mid to late 80's, it uses research results from prior to that era. The differences can be surprising, especially on statistics and the like.

Overall, I enjoyed playing Therapy. While one of the core game mechanics is hopelessly broken, it does provide for an interesting and enjoyable way to spend time together with your friends. It's also a great way to get to know people better. I wouldn't recommend it to people who are strangers, however, as part of the "experience" of the game is the shock you'll see and feel when people give answers contrary to your perception of yourself.