Girl Talk
The sleepover board game where a spinner dealt out confessions and dares, and chickening out meant wearing a red zit sticker for the rest of the night. Golden's Girl Talk came out in 1988 and ran through the 90s in enough editions to reach a CD-ROM with Backstreet Boys songs.
Girl Talk was Truth or Dare with a box and a scoring system. Invented by Catherine Rondeau and first published by Golden, the games arm of Western Publishing, in 1988, it came with an opaque spinner and a set of cardboard discs that slotted into it, each covered in questions and stunts about the things the box assumed girls talked about: boys, phone calls, dancing, parties and sleepovers. Land on a truth or a dare, do it, and you earned points. Refuse and you paid the game's signature penalty, a sticker zit stuck to your face for the rest of the game.
The points bought fortune cards in four categories, marriage, children, career and special moments, and the first player to collect one of each won a complete imaginary future. That mix of confession, minor humiliation and fortune-telling was a perfect fit for the late-80s and 90s sleepover, and the zit stickers became the thing everybody remembers, half punishment and half badge of honor.
The game grew a small franchise. Sequels included Girl Talk: Secret Diary and Girl Talk: Date Line, Hasbro took over publishing in 1995, and in 1998 Hasbro Interactive released Girl Talk: The CD-ROM Game of Truth or Dare, developed by Human Code and stocked with songs by the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. Licensed versions carried the name into the 2000s under That's So Raven and Hannah Montana branding, but the original box with the zit sheet is the one that still turns up in closets and on thrift-store shelves, usually with a few zits missing.
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