Target Audience: Long-distance friends, couples, or family members.
Game: We’re Not Really Strangers (WNRS) – Long Distance Edition.
Creator: Koreen Odiney (The WNRS Team).
Platform: Digital Pack (Browser/Mobile).
Recently, I played We’re Not Really Strangers (WNRS), a popular “Getting to know you” game. According to its website (link), WNRS is a “purpose-driven card game and movement all about empowering meaningful connections.” I played the Long Distance Edition Digital Pack with a close high school friend. We have known each other for 10 years; he is currently working in China, while I am still in school in the US. We hadn’t spoken in two months, so this was a great chance to catch up. Through this experience, I realized that the game’s structure transforms routine communication into a powerful tool for active listening and emotional discovery.
What the Game Revealed About My Communication Style
- Early questions like “What are you newly obsessed with?” and “What pissed you off this week?” felt natural — these are practical, narrative-driven topics I would ask any friend about.
- But question eight — “What have you been daydreaming about?” — felt different. Daydreams are not productive; they don’t lead to actionable takeaways. Yet sharing them felt surprisingly meaningful, like stepping into someone’s inner world. I realized my usual communication style leans heavily toward the practical, and this game pushed me to slow down and listen more patiently.
- Question fourteen — “What little thing reminds you of me?” — was another standout. My friend mentioned he recently went birdwatching and spotted a species we had tried to find together over a year ago. He sent me a photo. Without this prompt, that memory would have stayed buried. The game asks you to search through a mental gallery of small moments and bring them back to the surface — a kind of Discovery process.
Analysis Through the MDA Framework
- Using the MDA framework (Hunicke, LeBlanc, Zubek), this game’s mechanics are minimal: a set of question and action cards, played in sequence, with both players answering each one. There are no scores, no competition, no win condition.
- Yet these simple mechanics produce interesting dynamics. The questions are arranged from casual to personal, which creates a natural curve in conversation. The action cards — like “Pick a movie you can both watch this week” — are interspersed between deeper questions, acting as a kind of pacing mechanism that prevents the conversation from becoming too heavy.
- In terms of aesthetics, the game clearly prioritizes Fellowship (strengthening social bonds), Expression (encouraging self-disclosure through answering), and Discovery (uncovering things about yourself and your friend that you wouldn’t normally discuss). It deliberately abandons Competition — which is why it didn’t feel like a “game” to me at first. I was looking for this traditional aesthetic goal and not finding it.
Compared to similar games in this genre, WNRS occupies a specific niche. Uncurated seems more oriented toward icebreaking with strangers, while The Skin Deep leans toward romantic relationships. WNRS, especially the Long Distance Edition, fits the space of maintaining existing friendships across distance.
One design improvement I would suggest: for friends who haven’t spoken in a very long time — say, over a year — the game could benefit from a brief warm-up phase where players first share major life milestones before diving into “recent” questions like “Who have you grown closer to lately?” Without that context, some questions can feel slightly disconnected from reality.
Ethical Reflection: Social Norms
Honestly, I did not notice any friction around social norms while playing, because my friend and I are close and comfortable with each other. But reflecting afterward, I recognize that this comfort is not universal. WNRS assumes that players are willing to express emotions and inner thoughts directly through language — a norm more common in Western social contexts. In many East Asian cultures, including Chinese culture, emotional expression tends to be more reserved. A question like “What little thing reminds you of me?” is something many Chinese friends would rarely ask directly; it might feel overly sentimental. If such a moment did come up, it would more likely surface naturally inside another conversation rather than being asked as a standalone question.
WNRS is more than just a list of questions; it is a designed experience. It reveals how thoughtful mechanics can guide us to break our social routines and rediscover the people we care about.
