Title: Playing His Game
Author: Morgan James & Ashlyn Kane
Publisher: Boldwood Books
Release Date: August 10, 2026
Genre(s): Hockey Romance
Page Count: 307
Reviewed by: Crabbypatty
Heat Level: 4 flames out of 5
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Blurb:
He’s a scandal. He’s a role model. Together, they’re a headline.
When a candid photo of professional problem Mo – son of the Arizona Canyons’ owner – and Adam, the league’s first openly drafted golden gay, hits the internet, it doesn’t spark rumors. It confirms them. According to everyone, they’ve been secretly together for years.
Mo is one scandal away from losing everything, including his family’s support. Captain Adam, Phoenix’s most eligible gay bachelor, has spent his entire career being careful, respectable, unmessy. Publicly denying Mo could have a negative impact on him and his team.
So they make a deal: fake it.
What starts as damage control turns into a full-time performance, public appearances, staged dates, late nights that feel a little too real. The more convincing they are, the safer they’ll be. But the closer they get, the harder it is to tell what’s real and what’s strategy. Because somewhere between the arguments, the chemistry, and the us-against-the-world pressure… they stop pretending. Too bad the rules of the game don’t leave room for catching feelings…
Playing His Game gives us Adam Murphy, drafted at 18 by the Arizona Canyons as the first out gay hockey player. He’s a good polite Canadian boy, the product of 2 school teachers, so he’s very conscious of his responsibility to be a role model. Enter Moritz du Pont (Mo), the 15 year-old very prickly, very obnoxious son of the Canyons owners, who deeply resents his parent’s efforts to package him as their poster gay child, and otherwise control his every move.
Over the next 8+ years, they spar off-page occasionally at team functions until the night team captain Adam runs into a very wasted 24 year-old Mo outside a bar and Mo’s drunken fall into Adam results in a video that makes it appear their entanglement may be more of a passionate secret romance.
Called to the team offices to head off a PR situation, Mo blurts out to his parents they are dating, and a fake relationship begins Yes, it’s sudden and unrealistic (and 10% into the book), but here we are.
What ensues is a series of awkward situations and eventually sex on numerous surfaces, which should be hot but somehow reads as just something to advance the plot. Neither MC is big into self-reflection and we are given little by the authors to flesh out their characters more fully. For example, Adam has red hair, and Mo? We don’t know anything other than he’s a pretty twink and
he’s not tall. And oddly enough for a trust fund baby, he’s a talented auto mechanic.
A very Murphy Family Christmas, all sorts of estrangement and a HFN ending pulls together the final act, but personally left me disengaged. Also Mo remains way too obnoxious for far too long.
Finally, the book centers around hockey but with the lack of any serious hockey in the book, Adam could as well be a baseball, soccer or football player. And if other readers are like me, don’t bring up hockey unless you speak the language fluently.
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