Inside the sex quiz that you should NOT take if your relationship is on the rocks

How much does your partner really know about you? Do they have a clue about your guilty pleasures, the text message you fantasise about sending or the most cringe-worthy moment of your life?

Even if you’ve been together for ages, the chances are probably not.

That’s why it takes courage to try the new generation of couples’ board games which claim to act as DIY relationship therapy.

The aim of these grown-up games isn’t to win or lose, but to reveal secrets you’ve previously kept hidden from your partner – and vice versa – with the goal of bringing you closer together and even breaking you out of a marriage rut.

So, as I approach 25 years of marriage with my husband Anthony, which ones have the twists and turns to improve our openness and which will reveal uncomfortable truths better left unspoken?

Where Should We Begin?

£41, uncommongoods.com

With a royal blue box, embossed with gold lettering, this game was deliberately designed to look like an expensive box of chocolates, according to relationship therapist Esther Perel, who devised it based on her hit podcast of the same name.

Inside there are also lots of cards – 250 in all – but this time, they are more like opening lines in a story that each partner has to tell about themselves.

Anthony and I decide to play the simplest version of the game.

We dealt each other seven cards at random – then combined them with another set of prompt cards, designed to set the tone for the answer, for example directing you to reveal it in a more risqué, humorous or thoughtful way.

I quickly found Esther’s rather prurient questions seemed to presuppose a life that’s more exciting than the one we actually have.

Questions that came up for me included, ‘In my latest fantasy….’ (Answer: I’m on a sun lounger in the Maldives), ‘A kink I don’t understand…’ (Answer: I don’t think about other people’s sex lives, let alone try to understand them) and ‘My most tenacious vice….’ (Answer: Waitrose tea cakes).

Just to test him, I lobbed some tricky questions back at Anthony like: ‘The last time I cheated…’ and ‘I get bored during sex when…’

Very wisely, he told me he had nothing whatsoever to say on either and moved swiftly onto the next card in his pile.

I pinned him down on his most cringe-worthy sexual memory (being dragged into a train toilet by a sex-mad university girlfriend) and his worst kiss (a girl he’d met on a school trip who kissed like a vacuum cleaner).

Indeed, overall, the questions felt mostly designed to stir up clickbait-style confessions.

To be honest, if Anthony was keeping these many secrets from me, that would be a sign our marriage was in trouble.

Indeed, this is not a game to play if your relationship is on the rocks because of dark secrets or unresolved issues.

The game’s not much fun either – because we both found it so hard to rack our brains for incidents we hadn’t confessed to before.

Esther’s game also lacked Alain’s finesse. One baffling sentence to complete: ‘When someone can hear me going to the bathroom…..’

Call me prim, but what possible answer could there be to this? Bring a loudspeaker?

Rating: 5/10

CONNECT

£20.98, amazon.co.uk

When I invited Anthony to play, he was disappointed this wasn’t an adult version of Connect Four.

Instead, it’s a game from philosopher Alain De Botton’s School of Life – a neat red box containing 100 cards, divided by color and different subjects: Appreciation, Aspiration, Desire, Forgiveness and Growth.

Couples are meant to pick a card and ask their partner a question from the corresponding category. The idea is that each answer will spark a conversation that improves how well you understand and relate to one another. ‘Answer with depth and sincerity’, Alain purrs.

To head off any potential rows, Alain urges us to ‘Show mutual respect as you disclosed tender material’ and ‘relearn who you both are’.

‘You’re both taking risks for the very noblest reasons: Because you still love each other very much.’

We scoff at this rather cringe-worthy phrasing, but as his intentions seem worthy – and these days our marital conversations tend to revolve around house insurance and changing the cat litter – we crack on.

Anthony’s first roll of the dice tells him to draw from the Desire pile. His question for me is: ‘How would you like to come back together at the end of every day?’

This is occasionally.

I have been getting thoroughly fed up with Anthony bringing his computer to bed to check emails. Instead of raising it, I have been responding in a tit-for-tat style by immersing myself in my own laptop and using the time to post on social media for my work.

Result: A missed opportunity to reconnect and much mutual harrumphing as we turn our backs on each other after turning out the lights.

But hallelujah – this card has given me the opportunity to name the problem.

‘Oh, I thought you were working,’ Anthony said, shocked, when I explained how I wanted things to change.

‘I thought (its) you (its) were,’ I responded.

‘Ok, let’s leave the computers downstairs and read a book together instead,’ he replied.

Only one question in – and I’m already feeling warmer and fuzzier and our communication is improving.

Inevitably, after a quarter of a century of marriage, we have also stopped telling each other what we appreciate about each other.

So my question from the Appreciation pile leads me to ask Anthony to finish this sentence: ‘What I really admires about you…’

To be frank, I didn’t have a clue what he’d come out with. When he quickly answered, ‘Your honesty’, I nearly fell off the sofa.

All this time, I had assumed my forthright views on everything from family politics to parenting and music made him think I was a pain in the backside.

‘No,’ he announced: ‘It’s refreshing. You always get straight to the point.’

Wow, I finally feel seen. The mood of the evening was softening more and more.

As a trainee psychotherapist, I’m more aware than ever that so much unfinished business in childhood can show up in present relationships.

So, the next question that came up on Anthony’s pile was a particularly clever one, which we’d never thought to ask each other.

‘If I’d known you in childhood, I might have loved to…’

Knowing that my early years were turbulent, thanks to my parents divorcing and moving to opposite ends of the world, Anthony replied: ‘ I would have wanted to hold your hand when you were crying.’

When he said this, I did almost cry (which I don’t often do as a grown-up) – and this time he was there to give me a squeeze.

I’ve been married for 25 years, but this was truly the loveliest thing Anthony has ever said to me.

The Connect cards may not be cheap, but they’re still better value than marriage therapy.

Rating: 8/10

FOG OF LOVE

£36.19, board-game.co.uk

Fog of Love is to bring back the passion of being a couple first getting to know each other – with all the delicious uncertainty of not knowing whether the relationship will work out.

And this time round, you get the freedom to start all over again, from choosing different careers to new looks, character traits and goals.

The aim of the game – which does look more like a traditional board game with counters, characters and cards – is to see if you can jointly negotiate the sorts of challenges that new (and perhaps more Millennial) couples might face, like deciding whether to watch porn together.

First, Anthony and I get to choose our characters.

To be honest, it feels liberating to choose to be a blonde, leggy doctor with a good sense of humor, while Anthony chooses to be a Machiavellian entrepreneur with great teeth.

You then get a love story to play through, in which you react to different challenges – such as a difference of opinion in a restaurant or buying a puppy together.

Instead of winning or losing, ultimately the point of the game is to see how happy you make each other and whether you want to stay together.

Far from bringing back the excitement, however, this game simply tested our my patience.

There are so many pages in the rule book that it took longer to learn and play than it did to plan our wedding. We had it on our coffee table for four months. Both of us wanted it to be over so much we both behaved as unreasonably as possible to bring the relationship to a close.

My verdict? This is cosplay for board-game nerds, swingers or couples who are deeply bored of one another.

Fog of Love did have one benefit for our marriage; it recalled us we are perfectly happy just being ourselves with one another.

Rating: 2/10