I found this game drier than I expected. At first it appeared to be a set-collection game, but it soon became clear that it's really a set-collection race, with an emphasis on racing. It’s not too nasty though. There are things you can do to your opponent(s) to slow them down or mess up their plans, but only ever so slightly, and you can't knock anyone out of the game.

My husband and I decided to go head-to-head for our first game, to see who was the better matchmaker: him or me. We flipped over our first daughter and were off!

With neither of us yet realizing that the game was a race, we both took our time and collected a good number of suitable suitors beneath our girl. I managed to manipulate her statistics and find a good match a bit faster though, so I was soon starting on my second daughter leaving my husband temporarily in the dust.

He quickly realized that he needed to catch up. Realizing that I was being snobbier and more demanding in my search for a suitable candidate for my second daughter (I was going for higher victory point gentlemen), my husband decided to hurry up and marry off his dumb-as-dirt daughter to the first guy who'd take her, rather than waste time getting her some book-learnin’.

Then he sent his floozy of a second daughter off to the bar as frequently as possible, because with her low stats she couldn't really do any more damage to her reputation. He thought, correctly, that she might get lucky and find a guy with low standards just waiting there!

Realizing he was pulling ahead, I abandoned my hopes of a better marriage for my second daughter and bundled her off with a rich-enough gent. Now we were really going head-to-head, trying to maximize good gentlemen (high VP’s) with matching the daughter’s statistics as quickly as possible.

I had an agonizing choice between marrying my daughter off, as is, to a 4 VP gent or taking a turn or two to improve her VP’s enough to get her a 7 VP husband. I saw that my husband would meet the required statistics match-up for his last daughter and her suitor next turn, so I quickly caused some damage to her reputation by sending the Casanova over to woo her, and then exposing her to Smallpox.

I calculated that if I completed the quick-and-easy match for my daughter, I would regain the missing VP’s that a better match would bring by winning the “reputation” and “education” game-end awards. So a quick trip to the opera got her matched up with Mr. Low Standards and sparked the last round.

My husband tried to get his last daughter married too, but couldn’t managed to improve both her beauty and her brains in one turn, so she remained a spinster at game end.

He won the award for “most beautiful family”, as my families had concentrated on improving their minds, not their looks. I ended up with slightly better husbands though, except for that last one, and when all was said and done I ended up winning by 2 victory points.

We were really laughing by the time the end of the game rolled around and are looking forward to a rematch!