A few years ago I heard of an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice called, Lizzie Bennet Diaries. I binged that over the course of a couple of days, even watching episodes in bed with headphones on. At the end I looked at their random other episodes and there’s an episode of the characters of Lizzie Bennet Diaries playing Marrying Mr. Darcy. Once I saw their playthrough, I knew I NEEDED Marrying Mr. Darcy, or needed to give Marrying Mr. Darcy to Tara. I got to play the game when I visited her last week.
It was all I hoped for, even if I lost horribly, I can’t wait to play it again and maybe pick up the expansion (you know after I buy the game).
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How I first found Marrying Mr. Darcy
As I said, I found this after watching Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and then watching the cast play.
It’s adorable as all get out, and I’ve been dying to playMarrying Mr. Darcy ever since.
Quick How to Play Marrying Mr. Darcy
You start off picking who your character will be. I picked Lizzie, but each character has reasons she is good, though some might be harder to play.
Princess picked Caroline Bingley, Tara picked Jane Bennett (she is totally Jane), and Tara’s husband, Josh, picked Georgiana Darcy.
Each character doesn’t actually want to marry Mr. Darcy, as a side point. Obviously, his sister can’t, but each character has a particular person she gets the most points for marrying.
You start the game with three cards. Your cards will help you with the end game when you are trying to get a proposal. They can give you wit, beauty, dowry, cunning, friendliness, etc. Different men will be looking for different things in their potential spouse.
Cunning is used to determine what order you will be proposed to at the end, and dowry is only used if there’s a tie in points (other than two of the gentlemen who want a certain amount of dowry, yes we’re looking at you Wickham).
On your turn, you draw an event card and do what it says. About 2/3 of the time the card says “Draw one, play one,” with some sort of flavor text. The remaining third you get a special event, like a party, tea time, or something else making sense thematically.
I had bad luck with my card draws and got a lot of cards like you see up above, or “Gambling,” where I rolled a die to see what happened.
After a while, the table in front of you will look like this. You’ve got your different attributes your character has laid out for everyone to see (because some events cause you to lose cards or let you steal cards, poor Georgiana lost reputation for flirting with the soldiers). You can tell I’m not doing super well because this shot was taken towards the end, and I have practically nothing in front of me. By contrast, Jane (Tara’s character) had amazing cards in front of her, and Caroline (Princess’ character) had amazing stuff.
When all of the event cards have been played, you enter the proposal stage. The person with the most cunning gets to choose first, and every person she meets the requirements for will propose to her starting with the least desirable, Wickham, all the way up to the most desirable, Darcy. You roll the die to see if the person proposes, and decide if you will accept them.
It was a blast, but I lost so horrendously. Princess won, and she had a blast with that.
More Marrying Mr. Darcy fun
There’s two fun things you can add in:
More Card Game Fun
Card games are great for traveling, and all of these are nice, compact, and play in about 30 minutes.
Oh, too fun! Emma would enjoy playing this with me, I bet.