REVIEW: “Easy Answers”

Get ready to write as quickly as you can. A simple prompt appears, and it’s a battle of speed and wits to figure out who can come up with unique answers before others do the same. Is purchasing Easy Answers really an easy answer? We give it a shot to find out!

Game Name: Easy Answers (2025)
Designer: Justin, Jon, and Stephen
Publisher: Self-Published
Player Count: 4-10 Players
Playing Time: 30-60 minutes
Review Date: 5/28/2025
Reviewed By: Dan

Upfront Disclaimer: We were generously provided with a prototype copy of “Easy Answers” for purposes of testing it out and writing a review. No compensation was provided and I am free to write whatever I want about the game. All opinions contained within are my own unbiased thoughts.

Game Overview

It takes a lot of guts and a pretty high tolerance for risk to decide to publish a board game, and as a result I’m always nervous to take on prototype copies of games for testing from first-time self-publishers. Prototypes tend to be a little rough around the edges even when coming from established creators, and the last thing I want to do is be forced to be that guy who has to write a review tearing apart years of someone’s hard work.

The first-time game creators from Easy Answers reached out to offer up a pre-production copy of the game for me to test, and I looked into the marketing materials for the game – it definitely fits into the category of game that our site likes to cover, and I am always looking for fun new party games to try out, so I decided to give it a shot.

Easy Answers is a party game for 4 to 10 players, where players are given a simple prompt (for example: “a job at a restaurant”, or “a subject in school”). From this prompt, they need to come up with a one-word answer that fits as a response. Each player has an erasable whiteboard where they write the response as fast as they can and then race to put it face down in the middle of the table. The whiteboards end up stacked in order of who got their answer in the fastest, which matters in the scoring of each round. But it’s not just about who came up with an answer the fastest – it’s also important to try and think of a unique answer that NO one else will write. And to complicate matters even further, each round has a “dealer” – this is a player who draws two prompts from a draw pile, chooses one to keep, and then gets to write their own answer first before anyone else sees the prompt. Rather than go for a unique answer, the dealer’s goal is to write the answer that they believe the most other players will choose, because it not only cancels out any points those players would earn, but awards points to the dealer as well.

Scoring is very straight forward. The first player who comes up with a unique answer (not picked by any other player OR the dealer) is awarded 3 points. The second unique answer is awarded 2 points, and then all other valid (or non-unique) answers are given 1 point. Any player who either wrote the same thing as the dealer or wrote an invalid answer that doesn’t fit the prompt (as voted unanimously by the other players) is awarded zero points. And lastly, the dealer gets 1 point for every player who wrote the same answer as the dealer themselves. The game is a race to be the first player to score 25 points.

My copy of the game as received (again, this is a pre-production prototype) arrived without an exterior box, so I can’t comment on measurements or thoughts on the box itself. However, the components that arrived feel quite polished, and I suspect will likely be very close to the finished product. The game comes with 10 player “whiteboards”, which are somewhat thin cardboard rectangles that have a nice smooth glossy finish that is perfect for quickly scribbling on with a dry erase marker. There is also one additional board of similar size that acts as a scoring track, to help keep tabs on the score for each player as the rounds progress. There are 10 standard quality dry erase markers provided as well, each with an eraser on the cap, and they write crisply and are perfect for the game. There is a printed rulebook, which is basically just one folded over sheet of paper, but again, this is a VERY straight-forward game, and this is plenty of explanation and very well written (even including an example of an entire round to help illustrate the scoring). And most importantly, there are prompt cards – lots, and lots, and LOTS of prompt cards (280 to be exact, if I counted correctly). The prompt cards are standard playing card sized, and have a nice linen texture.

My Thoughts

Thankfully, after giving Easy Answers a few plays, I can wipe the sweat from my brow – no dreams will be getting killed by this review. I have really enjoyed this game so far, and more importantly, it has been a big hit with my wife and kids as a family game! This game enters a somewhat crowded genre, and it has some elements that remind me of other games: you can feel a little bit of influence from “Just One”, maybe a little bit of influence from “Scattergories” as well. But it still manages to carve out its own unique feel, which is a pretty impressive feat.

Unlike games where it’s tricky to come up with any qualifying answer to a fast prompt, Easy Answers really lives up to its name: it’s REALLY simple to pop a few great responses in your head for most of these prompts. But that is also why it’s a little tricky to strategize – you won’t be the only one who comes up with a handful of answers. Are you better off trying to just slap any word on your board and slam it down on the table to be first in line, or should you hesitate for a few seconds while you game out which answer you think is least likely to pop up on someone else’s board? It’s a gamble, and one you must decide on very quickly as the prompt is flipped over for everyone to see. The creators really described this well on the Kickstarter page – “a beautiful mix of anticipation, panic, and laughter” really sums up how this plays out in practice. In the span of 5 seconds, my brain is firing on all cylinders: “I want to get my answer in the fastest, but I also want it to be unique – but wait a minute, the dealer also had all the time he wanted to write his own answer first, and he’s not going to pick the MOST obvious answer, because he knows no one else wants to write the most obvious answer, so maybe I should go with the THIRD answer that pops into my head instead of the second…”.

The fact that the overwhelming majority of the prompts truly are easy to come up with a few answers to, really acts as the biggest strength of this game. The publishers say that this game is for ages 13+, but I think this is very conservative, and players could actually be much younger than this. The prompts are all completely work safe, there are no weird “Cards Against Humanity” style offensive things randomly buried within. My youngest son is 9, and he had a BLAST playing this game. We encountered a little difficulty on one single prompt of “A Blue-Collar Job” because he had no idea what that term meant, but otherwise, this is a truly excellent family game. In my house, this is the type of game we break out at the dining room table after we finish eating dinner, and from the very first round it was a big hit. Lots of laughter, and a lot of fun moments of anticipation as the dealer flips the answers over one by one to read them out loud. It got the ultimate praise for a game from my kids, the immediate question of “Can we play this again tomorrow night???” the minute the first game finished.

Some additional praise I’ll heap on this game – they include a LOT of prompts. Trust me, 280 of these cards shuffled together are enough that they will produce combinations that will greatly outlive any number of repeated plays of this game. Even in the event that players hear a prompt repeated in future games, it’s really not a big deal; this isn’t a trivia game where answers can be memorized, and you still need to factor in the tendencies of other players each time you decide to write down an answer.

From a player count perspective, our rounds so far have all been at the 4-player count, but I think this game would likely shine the most in the 6-8 player range. Don’t get me wrong, we had a blast at four people, but based on the way scoring is setup, I think there would be a lot more pressure on each answer with a couple additional players at the table. Perhaps not the full 10 players though – I could potentially see that taking a very long time for someone to reach the full 25 points, with only a max of two players each round scoring over 1 point (unless the dealer gets very lucky).

It’s not a perfect game, but I very much do enjoy it. One thing that is a little tough, is that being the dealer feels like a huge disadvantage at low player counts (especially with only 4 players). With such a wide variety of acceptable answers to any given prompt, it feels very difficult to score points as the dealer with only 3 other players offering up responses. In our first family game, the dealer never scored more than 1 single point in any round, and even that only happened very sporadically (maybe 1 in every 4 prompts). With only 4 or 5 players, I might suggest a house rule modification where the dealer actually gets 2 points for each time a player posts a matching answer, rather than just 1. That would probably result in more fair distribution of points, and also would add even more anticipation into the final reveal of the dealer’s own answer.

Verdict:

Easy Answers is an excellent party game for almost all ages, and a very impressive debut game for these first-time self-publishers. The foolproof rules and smooth mechanics keep the game moving along quickly and the laughter coming nonstop. I wholeheartedly recommend this game, particularly at higher player counts.

Likes:

Huge number of included prompts to keep the game fresh for many replays
The truly “easy answers” to these prompts make the game a hoot for anyone old enough to read and write; just as fun as a family game, as it would be for a group of adults
Devious mechanic to force players to rapidly decide between speed and uniqueness with every single response
Teachable to anyone in about 30 seconds flat, which is perfect for a party game

Dislikes: