Who needs dating apps when you’ve got aunties?

Bare minimum: paper, a printer, and scissors. If you want to get fancy, I recommend premium cardstock, matte laminator sheets and a laminator, and the creme de la creme of print and play games…a corner rounder. No papercuts on your watch!

My expansion pack. The agenda conditions are expanded to include traits (i.e. Sara must marry someone who is Educated, must marry someone who has the Same Religion etc.) This requires you to deduce which suitors have which trait, so grids are also included. It becomes more like a logic puzzle game (think Clue). This is for the serious game players.

Yes. So replayable. The rules have a set version that you can start with, and then you can regenerate a new play (with new priority traits, gossip card pulls, agendas, and dream dates) with the app forever onwards.

Sigh. Yeah. But why do you have to say it like that? There’s an app that allows the game to replayable. It remakes the matrix fresh so there is a stupid combinatorial amount of possibilities. It’s not infinite, but it’s a number that’s closer to infinity that it is to ten thousand, so.

MATH. In order to make this game replayable, I had to learn about matrix math. Thank you. I’ve now survived being Muslim and brown in Trump’s America AND matrix math. So if you’re playing per the rules, you won’t ever play with all the cards. The cards you pulled are tied to the matrix of Sara’s priorities and who is her dream date vs mid date vs bad date. The agendas are also tied to this, to balance how easy it is to win depending on your agenda. THAT IS ALL SO MUCH MATH. If you want to know the nuts and bolts, hire me to do a talk about it, okay? It’s actually super interesting but I’m tired of typing.

Great question! It’s the ‘modern’ version of arranged marriage. In arranged marriage, families would matchmake two individuals and they’d get married. Often sight unseen, with little or no meeting in-between. In arranged dating, families arrange dates, but the people dating usually make the final decision on if they’ll get married. Obviously, there’s tons of variability. There’s the whole question of timeline (some courtship is just a few months, some is similar to western dating of a few years). Also the extent to which the date is chaperoned (some have actual adult chaperones, some just go off on their own but their families know where they are). This game is based on the premise of arranged dating.

It’s inspired by my experiences with arranged dating, but no? I’m not quite sure how my life story could be an infinite loop of getting engaged to various men. Unless this is just all my possible timelines, which is pretty cool in a meta sense, but sad because I’d like to think my life has more plot than who I’m dating.

Nope. My name is Sana. Neither is a typo. See the About.

They dooo!! I very intentionally wanted to make a game that brought us together and helped us gain empathy for our respective roles. I wanted us to laugh and play together and build community. I wanted to debrief what we role-played in the game, and where it actually hurt and required acknowledgement. They are mostly kind and supportive, excited that I made something like this that reflects some of our culture. A few are a little hesitant–not all of my cards are PC and they’re worried what it means to put in writing that these types of things are said in our community. But I believe in order to talk about things…we’ve got to talk about things. (Wow what a sentence so insightful.)

“I” made it in 4 months for my thesis at NYU’s ITP program. (Airquotes because there is a whole village of playtesters and advisors and interviewees and ancestors behind me.) That’s the true logistics of it. But I do feel like this game has been within me, and the theme of my work, for years.

I hope so. I’d love to create more culturally specific gossip cards for various communities, and a queer pack, and fun alternate suitor packs like fresh off the boat boys, finance bros, etc.

I sure have. *crickets chirp* What a meaningful ‘yes or no’ question moment we just had.

Um, in 2026, it’s the done thing to accept we’re all racist. We all have some internalized anti-blackness, so that’s your own journey to go on. Is it racist to play this? Absolutely not! Cultural particularity is a way to ground the game, but please add your own spin and cultural perspective to it. We’ve played this game in Jewish, Middle Eastern, white men, group-of-stranger, and good-friend communities.

The gossip and agenda cards are a product of hundreds of hours of interviews I did with women of color. The content reflects that, which means it sometimes gets real and heavy, particularly for women who have navigated real rishta processes. I recommend reading through the cards to make sure you’re comfortable with all the topics that may be played. Issues that are mentioned: ICE, Palestine, divorce, colorism, religious prejudice, citizenship, and misogyny. Please feel free to take out any cards that don’t feel right for you or your table.

Okay, listen. How it’ll likely go down is someone Gen Alpha to Millenial will be like OMG THIS GAME! They’ll bring it to a family function and actually read the rules. Literally no one else will. But I have found that that’s okay! Just let the family come and go, say they “just want to watch,” play the gossip cards whenever they want, chaperone random dates and see the outcomes. Let them gaslight you when they say you’ve never told them about the sabr tracker and secret agendas. It’s still very fun and you get to yell together as opposed to, you know, at you.

YEAH! Please. Games are made to have house rules. Especially games where you’re playing as family.