by Danielle Reynolds

“Love” for many can be a roller coaster of ups and downs. I had a six-year relationship with a woman I almost married and after that break up my friends were pushing me to go on apps because they wanted to play “swipe” (and probably have me find love). Most of them were in monogamous relationships and never got to experience Tinder, Hinge, Bumble or whatever the flavor-of-the-week app was.

No offense to my friends but I didn’t trust them to just take my phone and pick what girls I should date so I’d watch to make sure they knew what I liked before I let them play “swipe”. This concept is what inspired the design of Perfectly Imperfect. I wanted players to learn from dating profiles what each other’s red and green flags were in the form of a conversation party game.

This design spent years changing names and directions before it found its way to becoming Perfectly Imperfect. The cousin of this game was a design I attempted based on the concept of getting ghosted but I ditched the concept in 2019. In 2021, a yearish after my breakup, the first form of Perfectly Imperfect began as Date or Hate. Profiles were written to resemble public domain characters like Robin Hood. Each card was double-sided with a girl profile on one side and a boy on the other. That way you could turn the deck depending on a player’s preference. It was cute but people knew these characters. They had many pre-existing opinions and didn’t learn as much about each other as I had wanted.

So I took a second stab at the content with the help of my uncle Terry. We wrote historically bad people/fictional characters into the game. You’re now dating the worst of the worst. The problem is, not only was that not fun, people didn’t want to think about dating a tyrant even if it was written comedically.


So I tried again on my own. This time I wrote them all as gender neutral, researching names that could work for all the profiles. By this point it was 2023 and I was playtesting the game with David Gordon and TAM in New York City. We did some brainstorming and TAM suggested a new take for the look of the game. With the new gender neutral profiles I needed a name that better fit and he suggested Abstract Love. I loved the idea of leaning into something I’m very passionate about, gender identity and sexuality. As a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, I love seeing games with gender neutral writing and characters. I updated the prototype and made fun abstract art for the 60ish profiles I had made for pitching the game. The new look also got printed in a much nicer box thanks to a short sponsorship from Launch Tabletop.

The mechanics up until this point had one player as the Dater and the others as the Friends each round. Three profiles got read and players placed a yes, no or maybe token facedown under each profile. Then the Dater would place theirs and flip to see what matched. You’d score one point per match and rotate Daters each round until you played 1-3 rounds depending on player count. The only additional element was a suggestion offered by David to add a confidence token that gained you an extra point when you matched up. Funny enough, the future publisher Randolph would later relate this mechanic in what was in their successful Oh, Really? game insisting they would have added it had it not been there.


The content hadn’t changed but the facelift gave it a new fresh look that caught publishers' eyes. In 2025, at the Gathering of Friends Joël Gagnon, who I'd met two years before, sat down for a pitch between me and Randolph. When pitching, I explained the journey of the game but it was the fact that most of the content was based on reality and that I had actually done most of the playtesting of the game on actual dates that made them ask to play. I pulled out my prototype and we played. They saw the parallels between Abstract Love and Oh, Really? knowing it would perform well in Montreal at their cafes. They especially loved this game played great at two-players as well as eight-players, giving a slightly different experience but still causing laughter, conversation, and tales that left the gaming table.

Joël took a prototype and a few months later we had a contract signed with a fast turnaround for me to write the content. As most party game designers know, the written content can make or break a game so I did a lot of playtesting to get the game up to the 200 profile cards you see in the final version. Randolph had also loved the gender neutral profiles but suggested switching from real names to user names which gave me a fun way to add plenty of cheeky jokes in. They also wanted to go back to each profile having three interests and there being no images like the Date or Hate version had. We worked to balance these interests with the profile text to make the people seem interesting and allow players to focus on different details. We also added a scoring mechanism for the Dater to receive the same amount of points as the highest scoring Friend.

A challenge that came when writing the profiles was receiving a head injury when returning from Gen Con in August 2025. The passenger next to me dropped their suitcase from the overhead bin onto my head before deboarding the plane. This led to an ER visit and my fifth diagnosed concussion with a new barrier of limited to no screen time as I recovered. So I channeled my inner middle schooler and journaled my thoughts creating all the original profile drafts in my design journal then using the talk to text feature added them into a spreadsheet to share with my publisher. My friend Amanda Rivera was incredibly helpful in reviewing the profiles to fix the talk to text typos, playtesting and helping me brainstorm funny profile names. The journey of this game really showed me how important my friendships were.


Due to my head injury I was restricted in how much screen time I was allowed for months so whenever I got stuck on what to write in the next profile I’d read, call a friend or work on an art project to help with inspiration. One project included two paintings based on the art of my Abstract Love prototype that still hangs above my bedroom.

A huge hurdle came in what to call this version of the game. Abstract Love no longer made sense with the illustrations being removed and didn’t scream dating game. We spent most of September going through different name suggestions until they landed on Perfectly Imperfect which had been one of the profile user names based on the popular saying. It was short, simple, elegant and would end up being quoted many times in casual conversation still to this day by me and my friends.



The timeline for this game had been sped up due to Hachette taking the game and deciding to distribute it in English before Randolph put it out in Canada. Their goal was a Spring 2026 release so I spent August and September 2025 playtesting non-stop in my freetime and tweaking the profiles along with Randolph’s translator Matthew Legault reviewing changed content. The English edition of the game would have me as the writer while the French would be a combination of translations and original profiles that related to French Canadian locations/sayings - so no more Trader Joe’s jokes!


In October 2025 while I was traveling through France after SPIEL I was receiving proofs of the cards and box to review. The illustrator for the game was the same as Oh, Really?. MC Marquis was an incredibly talented artist that made the box look like a piece of art that should stay out indefinitely on people’s coffee tables. I e-mailed feedback from trains and pulled my friends Elizabeth Hargrave, Mattand Donna Leacock to give their thoughts while doing the final playtests in Europe. I appreciated the amount of collaboration that the Randolph team had with me to get this game to the finish line. Not all publishers let the designer be this involved but this game was years in the making and I wanted to see it through to the end.


Fast forward to New York Toy Fair 2026 I got to hold a mass production copy of the game in my hands and make a few videos about the inspiration behind this game. It’s wild to think how many bad dates went into this game between the content and the playtests. A few years ago I had made playtesting at breweries my go to first date idea. Figuring if the date didn’t go well I’d at least have a good story and some more playtesting data. I learned that the game could be just as fun with people you didn’t know as the ones you did. It also helped me learn if a second date would happen or not (there was never a second date back then). I even used the published version of the game to play with my now girlfriend to see how well we matched each other. I always hated dating apps and the pressure people put on me to use them to find love but hey, I eventually found my perfectly imperfect partner and I couldn’t be happier where that relationship or this game is going. I hope people enjoy the game as much as I do now that it’s out!