Scratch Off Date Night Cards Honest Review: Including the Duds

My daughter handed us a small box at our anniversary supper in June and told us not to open it in front of her. It was the Scratch Off Date Night Cards from All Natural Shop, thirty-five cards and two little scratching coins, and Hal turned the box over twice and read the back before he set it on the sideboard with the rest of our pile. That was five months ago. We have scratched ten of the thirty-five. Two of those ten were duds, we did them anyway because that is the rule, and I am going to tell you exactly what kind of card fell flat so you can decide whether that would bother you.

Most of what you will read about this deck says every single card is a lovely surprise. Ours was not. What it was, honestly, was a reason to stop eating supper in front of the television, which is the thing that started all of this for us. After our daughter moved out in September of last year the house got quiet in a way I did not expect, and Hal and I were going whole evenings without saying anything to each other past the schedule and the weather. So I am not going to sell you a box of cards as anything more than a box of cards. It is a good box of cards. Here is the whole picture, duds and all.

One thing before the details. I am fifty-seven and Hal is sixty and we have been married thirty-one years. We have never seen a counselor, I am not one, and nothing about this was a marriage in trouble. We were just quiet. If you are reading this because something is wrong, a deck of cards is not the answer and I would not want you to spend money thinking it is. If you are reading this because your evenings have gotten dull, you are exactly who I am writing for.

What Actually Comes in the Box

Thirty-five scratch-off cards, two heart-shaped coins for scratching, and a short instruction sheet, all in a standard box that weighs about five and a half ounces. The cards are cardstock, the printing is in English, and the whole thing is built for two players. The listing puts the recommended age at sixteen and up. Ours is the improved version of an earlier printing, which matters only in this way: the scratch coating came off clean with the coin and did not tear the card underneath, and I have read enough from people who owned the earlier one to know that was not always true. Everything about the All Natural Shop deck is manual. You scratch, you read it out loud, you go do it.

The one rule is printed on the card and it is the only rule. You do the date you scratch. There is no trading, no redrawing, no putting one back for a better week. Each card front also carries a set of clues that tell you, without giving the whole thing away, whether the date happens at home or somewhere out. Some of those clues are obvious the second you read them. A couple of them fooled us completely, which was half the fun.

How We Have Actually Used It

We landed on every other Saturday. Supper is around six thirty, the dishes are done by seven fifteen, and the box comes down off the sideboard next to the kitchen table. We take turns scratching, which sounds like a small thing and is not, because whoever scratches is the one who has to read it out loud and commit to it. The coins work better than a fingernail and better than a knife, and I keep them in the box so they do not wander off into a drawer. We have lost enough small objects over thirty-one years. After the card is scratched we look at the calendar and pick the day. A few we did the same night. A few sat on the counter for a week while we waited for a Saturday that suited the clue.

Ten cards in five months works out to about one every two weeks, which is what the deck seems built for. At that pace we have roughly a year and a half before the box is empty. I know people who have worked through the whole thing in a couple of months, and I understand why. If you are the kind of couple who will scratch four in one sitting, know going in that this is a one-time deck. There is nothing to reuse and nothing to save.

The other thing I would tell you is that the scratching itself takes about ten seconds and the arguing over what the clue meant takes ten minutes. That is not a complaint. Ten minutes at the table with the television off is the whole point, and we have gotten it thirty-five times over from one small box.

The Two Duds, Described by Type

I am not going to tell you what the cards said, because the surprise is the product and I am not going to ruin it for you. I will tell you what kind of date failed us, because that is the useful part. The first dud was a home date that required both of us to be good at something neither of us is good at. Hal is a maintenance supervisor and can fix nearly anything in this house. I ran a school office for most of my working life. Between us we had exactly no talent for the thing on that card. We tried it for about twenty minutes, laughed at ourselves, and put it away. It was not a bad evening. It was just not a date.

The second dud was an out-of-the-house card that turned out to be closer to an errand than a treat. That is as specific as I will get. We did it, we laughed about it on the drive home, and we agreed we would not have picked it ourselves in a hundred years, which is fair, because picking for ourselves is exactly the thing we had stopped being able to do. Two out of ten is a twenty percent dud rate for us. I think that is about right for a deck built on surprises. If a twenty percent chance of a shrug is going to ruin your evening, this is not your product.

The other eight went from fine to genuinely good. The best one was a home card I would never have thought of on my own, it cost nothing, and it took about an hour. That is the entire argument for a deck like this in one sentence. Left to ourselves, Hal and I default to the same three things. A card does not default.

Eight of our first ten were worth the evening. The two that were not, we finished anyway, and I would still take a box with a couple of duds in it over another Saturday where we say nothing at all.

The Clue on Every Card Does Real Work

I did not expect to care about this part. Each card front carries hints that let you work out whether you are staying in or going out before you commit, and at first I thought that was decoration. It is not. Getting dressed for the wrong kind of evening is the fastest way to sour a date at our age. If the clue says out, I know to put on real shoes and find my good purse. If it says home, I know not to fight Saturday traffic for nothing. The clues are not always easy either. One of them had us both convinced it was an out card when it was not, and we ended up in the kitchen with the porch door open, which was better than what we had planned.

The clues also give you something to talk about before you commit. We have spent a solid ten minutes going back and forth over what a card meant, and every one of those minutes happened at the table with nothing on. You could argue the arguing is the point.

What Five Months Has Not Fixed

The deck does not make Hal into a talker. He is sixty years old, he is quiet, and he is going to stay that way. What the deck does is give him something concrete to react to, and he reacts to a card far better than he does to an open-ended question about how he is feeling. That is not nothing. But if you are buying this hoping it will change the way your husband communicates, put it back on the shelf. It is a date night product, not a communication product. We keep a separate deck for the talking and it does that job much better.

The rule is also a real commitment and I want to be straight with you about that. You do the date you scratch. If you are a couple who will ignore the rule and redraw, you have bought yourself a small box of suggestions and not much else. The rule is what makes the whole thing work. It is also what made us do two dates we would have skipped, and while we laughed about both, I will not pretend we enjoyed them.

One more thing nobody tells you. The cards do not keep well once they are scratched. The coating comes off in little curls and the card looks used, so this is not something you can pass along to your sister when you are done. It is used up when it is used up. I do not love that, and I also do not know how you would build a scratch-off card that survives being scratched.

How It Sits Next to the Rest of Our Pile

We keep five things in a wicker basket on the sideboard, and the scratch-off cards have one job that nothing else in there does. They get us out of the routine. The Couples Game is the light one for tired Thursdays, where we write answers on the little boards and flip them together and Hal's handwriting becomes a joke for the fourth time. Deeper Talk is the heavy one, Sunday after supper, one or two cards, about twenty minutes. Jaipur is for competing. Sky Team is for the nights when competing would leave one of us sulking, since we are on the same side in that one. If what you want is a real conversation rather than an activity, the cards will disappoint you. If what you want is a reason to be somewhere other than the living room, they do that just fine.

The other thing worth saying is that we tried planning our own date nights in the spring, before the box arrived. We got three weeks in and ran out of ideas, and the fourth week we did nothing and called it a rest. That is the problem a deck solves. It does not solve it forever. It solves it thirty-five times, which is more than we managed on our own, and I say that as a woman who is generally in favor of my own ideas.

Who This Is For

This is for couples who have been together long enough that the default evening is supper and the television, who are not in any kind of crisis about it, and who have noticed the quiet and would like to do something about it that does not involve a long conversation about the quiet. It is for people who will follow the one rule, because the rule is the engine. It suits couples where one person is quiet and does better with something concrete in front of them than with an open question. And it is a genuinely good gift, which is how we got ours. My daughter picked well. I would not have bought it for us, and I would have been wrong.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if what you want is a conversation deck. This is not that, and there are better tools for that job. Skip it if you are going to redraw the cards you do not like, because you will have paid for a box you are quietly ignoring. Skip it if a twenty percent chance of a dull evening is going to make you cross with each other, or if every date in your house has to be an occasion. And skip it if you are shopping for something to carry a hard season in your marriage, because a box of cards is not a counselor and I am not one. We were never in trouble. We were just quiet. Quiet is what this fixes, and it fixes it about eight times out of ten.