8 Games Like We're Not Really Strangers for Couples, Free Ones Included

The red cards are stacked face down on the coffee table, level three ended a while ago, and neither of you has gotten up to turn the overhead light back on. Tonight you learned things that four years of dinners never told you, and you already know the box is headed for the shelf, next to the games that only come out over the holidays.

If you're looking for games like We're Not Really Strangers, WNRS for short, it's probably to get that evening back without replaying cards you already know the answers to, or because its first level was written for strangers and the two of you stopped being strangers a long time ago, or because it doesn't play well with a thousand miles between you.

Wanting to play again doesn't mean you've run out of things to say to each other, it means you just found out how much was left.

What We're Not Really Strangers does well (and what it costs)

First, what it gets right. Koreen Odiney, a model and photographer, had been stopping strangers on the street to ask them questions since 2014, and the card game grew out of those conversations in 2018.

Its idea fits in three levels: Perception, where you guess the impression the other person gives at first glance, Connection, where you tell each other your stories, and Reflection, where you look back on what the evening taught you about each other.

The wildcards, set apart from the questions, apply to everyone at the table, and the progression does the rest: you reach the serious questions without noticing. The game holds 4.7 out of 5 across more than 6,000 Amazon ratings in the US.

The real price is $25 on the official shop, and the same on Amazon, where the brand sells it directly. For a box that holds a whole evening, that's fair, and the question isn't so much what it costs as how many times you'll open it.

Its limit lies in its form more than in its questions. It's a game for one evening: 150 cards, and once they're played, you know the answers. Its first level is made for strangers or friends (guessing the first impression you give has less bite after four years of sharing a home), and it's the Couples Edition, sold separately, that turns every question toward the two of you.

A good evening doesn't make a habit, and the habit is often what you're after when you close the box. The brand clearly knows it, since it also sells one scratch-off card a day (more on that below).

8 games like We're Not Really Strangers, and who each is for

They run from the question games closest to WNRS to the ones that no longer fit in a box. Prices come from each brand's own shop or from Amazon.

1. Let's Get Deep, the lighter take

The most direct cousin: 200 cards for couples, in three levels (Ice Breaker, Deep, Deeper), with activity cards to get you off the couch between two questions. The tone is more playful, flirtier too, and the complaint that keeps coming back is tied to that: questions too basic, whose answers a settled couple often already knows.

It's $21.99 from the brand, often less on Amazon, where it holds 4.5 out of 5 across more than 6,000 ratings.

Pick this if you want to laugh as much as you open up, and the depth of WNRS felt heavy for a Tuesday night.

2. Where Should We Begin, Esther Perel's game of stories

Psychotherapist Esther Perel made a game where you don't answer, you tell. Each of you holds seven cards that open a sentence ("I need to change…", "Something I've learned to let go of…"), the die gives a prompt, everyone plays a card face down, and the storyteller picks the opening they'll unfold. It's the name Reddit brings up whenever someone asks for something better than WNRS.

200 story cards, 2 to 6 players, for partners, friends or a first date. It's $34.99 on Amazon, where it holds 4.4 out of 5 across some 700 ratings, and it's sold out on the official shop.

Pick this if you'd rather tell stories than answer questions, and you'll also play with four or six, among friends.

3. TableTopics Couples, the cube on the dinner table

No levels, no rules: 135 questions in a clear acrylic cube, set in the middle of the table, and a card you draw somewhere between the main course and dessert. Its buyers say it mostly helps the quieter of the two to talk.

It's $25, with 4.6 out of 5 across more than 3,000 ratings on Amazon, though it's out of stock on the brand's own shop.

Pick this if you'd like a question without any ceremony, over dinner, and one of you talks less readily than the other.

4. {THE AND}, the one that goes furthest

{THE AND} was born from a documentary: couples filmed face to face, asking each other the questions people usually keep to themselves. It won first prize for interactive documentary at World Press Photo in 2015, and today it's followed by nearly a million subscribers on YouTube. Some buyers find its questions too intense, and that's exactly what others come looking for.

The Couples Edition gathers 199 of them, with no rules and no timer, for $29 in cards or $22 as a digital edition. On Amazon, the brand sells the box for $29.99, rated 4.6 out of 5 across more than 900 ratings.

Pick this if you're ready to go where it stings a little, or you play at a distance, since the digital edition reads on a screen.

5. The 36 questions to fall in love, the free original

Before all these games, there was Arthur Aron's study, in 1997: students who didn't know each other, 36 questions in three sets that grow more intimate, 45 minutes, and pairs who felt much closer at the end than the ones who had only made small talk.

Mandy Len Catron made them famous in 2015 in the New York Times' Modern Love column, adding four minutes of looking into each other's eyes, which weren't part of the study, and ten years later she married the man she had asked them with.

They're free on Berkeley's Greater Good site, and the New York Times keeps its own list, for subscribers.

Pick this if you'd like to try tonight without buying anything, and you're both willing to go all the way to the thirty-sixth in one sitting.

6. The free and online versions, what really exists

There's no official We're Not Really Strangers online: the brand has no app, and its digital version is still only a waitlist. It does give away eight small editions as free PDFs, among them a Quarantine Edition, 25 questions to stay close when you're far apart.

The sites that copy its cards aren't the brand's. For a real free game on your phone, the Gottman Card Decks app lines up more than a thousand cards.

Pick this if you'd like a taste of the game before buying it, or you play from either side of a screen.

7. Most likely to questions and long-distance games, all free

The questions that hit closest are about the two of you, and no deck has those. Our hundred most likely to questions for couples play tonight with nothing but a finger to point at each other, from the everyday ones that make you laugh to the tender ones you rarely dare say.

Apart, our 25 games to play with a long distance partner work by text, even six time zones away, and these 80 long distance relationship questions climb in depth the way the levels of WNRS do. All of it is free.

Pick this if you want the questions to be about the two of you, and not about any couple at all.

8. 21 Challenges for Two, one evening at a time

Arthur Aron, the man behind the 36 questions, measured the other half in 2000: couples who do something new together see their relationship grow more than couples who stick to something ordinary. Questions open you up, and what you live together brings you closer.

21 Challenges for Two is the edition Unveil wrote on that idea, a calendar neither of you has read ahead: each evening, a square opens on two challenges of different kinds (words, a gesture, an outing), you pick one, and a photo or a few words seal the night.

It opens on both your phones from a link, with nothing to install, for $14.99 paid once, and at the end of the three weeks you're left with the album of your twenty-one evenings. There's also a version for long-distance couples, and if you'd rather choose your own, our 30-day couple challenge is free to take on, one a day.

It's less a marathon conversation than a date: one challenge a night, and the rest tomorrow.

Pick this if what you loved about WNRS was the evening itself, and you'd like it back twenty-one nights in a row.

See the 21 Challenges for Two

We're Not Really Strangers vs the Couples Edition (and 365)

Three boxes from the same brand, and not for the same night.

The dividing line is who the question looks at. The original gets you talking about yourself, to a partner as much as to a friend, and one player on Reddit sums it up well: "If you want to know the deeper parts of this person's mind, play the original. If you want to specifically improve a relationship, play the couple's edition."

The Couples Edition asks for a story already underway, and one five-star buyer advises waiting until you're past your first year together. It holds 4.6 out of 5 across more than 2,700 Amazon ratings, and the two sell together for $36 instead of $45.

365, finally, is the brand's answer to the evening that doesn't last: one scratch-off card a day, a question or a small challenge, for a whole year.

Games like We're Not Really Strangers at a glance

Prices checked on each brand's US shop and on Amazon.com in October 2026.

How to choose

The real question is what you want to keep from that evening. If it's the conversation, the kind that goes deep, another deck will do the job beautifully: {THE AND} to go further, Esther Perel to tell stories, Let's Get Deep to laugh more. And if you'd rather not spend anything, the 36 questions and our lists cost nothing at all.

If it's finding each other more often, look for what comes back: one question a day on your phone, which apps like Paired do very well, or one challenge a night, to live rather than to tell, the way scratch-off books like The Adventure Challenge and its alternatives do.

Ten years from now, you won't remember which card you drew that night. You'll remember what they answered, and that ever since, the two of you haven't needed a game to ask each other questions.