“Pick the member of the group who likes you the least and tell him how it is his problem.”
It sounds like a directive from a reality-show producer, but in fact, it is a challenge from the greatest board game of all time: Group Therapy.
In the three years since I stumbled upon Group Therapy at the dearly departed Paula Rubenstein antique shop in New York, it has become one of my most cherished possessions. The game has strengthened existing friendships, formed the basis for new ones, and earned me more dinner-party invitations than my personality alone could account for. Other guests are kindly asked to bring desserts, wine or sides. My assignment: Bring Group Therapy.
The instructions say Group Therapy is intended “for people who want to open up. Get in touch. Let go. Feel free.” Ignore this, because as someone with a constitutional aversion to getting in touch, letting go and feeling free, I submit that Group Therapy is for everyone, and may actually be best enjoyed by — and among — those for whom “opening up” sounds about as appealing as earnestly playing a board game.
The rules are simple: Players begin on a space labeled “Hung Up.” To advance, they take turns selecting Therapist cards that prompt variously invasive, difficult, and uncomfortable psychological challenges. A few representative examples:
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“Choose a member of the group to be your father and ask him for something that is difficult for you to request.”
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“You have been accused of over-intellectualizing your hang-ups. Respond — without falling victim to that criticism.”
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“You are advertising yourself as a lover. What does the ad say?”
The player who drew the card reacts accordingly, at which point the true genius of the game is revealed. Other members of the group reward truthful and thoughtful performances by brandishing a card that reads “With It” — or condemn oblivious, insincere and superficial posturing by flashing the other side of the card, which reads, brutally, “Cop Out.” For every With It card, advance a square toward the end; for every Cop Out, retreat a square back to the beginning. That’s right: The only way you win at the game is if the group decides you deserve it.
How does this play out in real life? Surprisingly well! Group Therapy only sounds like a nightmare; in reality, it’s actually extremely fun. I’ve gasped as high-achieving friends confessed the existence of off-brand siblings. I’ve heard a couple’s diametrically opposed philosophies on child-rearing being shared, apparently for the first time, through gritted, wine-stained teeth. I’ve learned about broken engagements, hidden talents, failed careers, starter marriages, and covert left-handedness. Every time I’ve played, every single person I’ve played with has surprised me in some way.
It’s thrilling, it’s fascinating, but … isn’t it all so awkward? Yes, it is all awkward, and that’s why it works. In other words: If everything is awkward, then nothing is awkward, so no, it’s not awkward at all. The only awkwardness comes when someone refuses to grant themselves permission to be awkward — the psychological equivalent of being the only person in the sauna clinging to the towel. In a room full of naked people, no one notices flesh, only its absence.
Most players take the game seriously from the start, but those who do play it cool or give “funny answers” are gently nudged toward earnest participation by the Cop Out cards. After a couple rounds, sarcastic deflections tend to disappear like cockroaches after the flip of a light switch.
Irony never screams “defense mechanism” as loudly as it does during Group Therapy, and rarely is it so ineffective. Revealing nothing actually reveals a great deal, as it did in the case of the husband-and-wife duo who could barely bring themselves to acknowledge that they have, you know, had sex without resorting to winking terms like “our lovemaking.” Was there ever so much there there?
Group Therapy is no less than social alchemy. When’s the last time you were at a dinner party and willingly engaged your spouse’s ex-colleague’s college roommate’s wife in an earnest conversation? If there wasn’t a board game that literally required it, probably never, God willing! Does Group Therapy make any promises that you will end up liking your spouse’s ex-colleague’s college roommate’s wife? Certainly not! And you won’t. Of course you won’t. Especially after she divulges her plans to “disrupt the diabetic sock industry” — an ambition revealed, improbably, by the Therapist Card that read, “You died yesterday. Deliver a sincere eulogy to yourself.”
Group Therapy was very much created in the late 1960s. But peak zeitgeist-penetration came a few years later, in 1973, when an “All in the Family” episode titled “The Games Bunkers Play” revolved around a few rounds of Group Therapy at the Bunker household. Doors are slammed. Previously unthinkable hugs occur. It becomes increasingly apparent that this one couple is really jazzed to have sex as soon as they get home. And the players gain genuine insights into themselves and one another.
In all, it’s an extremely realistic portrayal of the experience of playing Group Therapy. Which makes sense: the episode’s story credits belong to Susan Perkis Haven and Dan Klein, two-thirds of the unlikely trio that created Group Therapy.
The year was 1968. The place — it almost goes without saying — was the Upper West Side of Manhattan, land of 1,000 therapists, Shrinkri-La. Haven, a writer, and Klein, a recently graduated philosophy major, were kibitzing with journalist and friend Phil Ross when History Happened. In an interview with the online literary magazine The Millions in 2016, the group said the idea for the game originated with Klein’s observation that group therapy, the novel mental-health craze then sweeping the city, “sounds like a game,” to which Haven had replied, “Well, if you think about it, maybe it really is a game.”
Guess how many of the three creators spent the rest of their lives making board games? Correct, zero. Now guess how many eventually became actual therapists? Correct again, it’s most. Of the three, only Klein, a humor writer, did not eventually open up his own practice.
Before I became thrice self-actualized (winning Group Therapy three times), I never understood why consenting adults would play Monopoly or Scattergories or Dungeons & Dragons. And the experience of participating in something so shatteringly unfun as Cards Against Humanity is legitimately dehumanizing — cards win every time.
That’s not to say there aren’t games I enjoy — ever play Guess Who? as a drunk, cruel adult?— but as party activities go, I could never get behind them. The entire point of spending time with your friends is to hear about their lives, tell them about yours, and speculate about the lives of others. Why strategize about the most efficient way to Connect Four when you could be having an adult conversation about something real or relevant? Like whether someone you know has a baby who sucks?
Board game enthusiasts would argue that through competition, you do learn about other players. And sure, friends may obliquely reveal themselves to be surprisingly cutthroat or strategic or risk-averse.
But that’s precisely what makes Group Therapy so great: You don’t have to sit around on the off-chance someone incidentally outs himself as a toxic, petty monster. In Group Therapy, you suss out a person’s true nature by the way they respond to prompts like “Talk about your loneliness” or “Why would you not like the whole group to be nude right now? Why would you?”
It’s a board game without any of the tedious board game stuff, and that is why it is the greatest board game in history. Alas, copies of Group Therapy are hard to come by, although its follow-up, Couples, is currently available on eBay for $49.99 … or rather, it was available until moments ago, when someone bought it. In the spirit of radical honesty, I’m prepared to reveal something deeply intimate and profound: That person was me. Pretty “With It,” right? Now what do I win?
