You"ve Been Sentenced - Game Review
About.com Rating
Verbally gifted kids love language and love to play with it. They love puns and other kinds of word humor...and they enjoy playing language games. You've Been Sentenced is a language game in which players must create the longest sentences they can with the word cards they are dealt. The game has won 18 awards, among them the Parent-Tested, Parent-Approved (PTPA)Seal of Approval, the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Gold Seal, Dr.
Toy "Best Products Winner," the National Parenting Center Seal of Approval, Creative Child Magazine Seal of Excellence, Scholastic's Instructor Magazine Teacher's Pick, the Parents' Choice Award, and the Mensa Parenting for High Potential "Hot Product."
Description
- For 3 to 10 players, ages 8 and up.
- Takes 30-45 minutes to play
- Includes 540 five-sided cards, a timer, score sheet pad, and a pencil.
- Created by McNeill Designs for Brighter Minds
The Cards
The game cards are quite unique. First of all, they are pentagram shaped. Each side of the pentagram has a word or two on it. The words around the pentagram are always related somehow. For example, they may all be possessive pronouns: ours, her, hers, his, theirs. Or they may all be "connecting" words like a, of, the, to, and. They may have words which player can use to create prepositional phrases: before the, because of, another of, away from, around the or to create other modifying phrases and clauses: when will, when would, which of, which the, very many.
Some of the cards have specific nouns like the kitchen, the bar, the waiting area, the restaurant, the lounge while others have proper nouns such as Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia,Houston, Phoenix. Some of the proper nouns are names all related by the fact that they start with the same letter of the alphabet: Odysseus, Ornery Ozzie, Orion, Ophelia, Wild "O" name (these name cards always have a "wild side."
What you notice is that the words on the cards are all related somehow. The majority of the cards have words that are related to one another because they are some variant of the same word. For example, they may all be different forms of the same verb: grow, grows, grew, growing, grown. Or they may have the same word base: odd, odds, odder, oddest, oddly or living, lived, lives, lives, life.
Game Play
Players are dealt a hand of ten cards, which they use to create the longest grammatically correct sentence possible. While they may have ten cards, players actually have fifty different words since each card has five related words on it. A player will try to create a ten-word sentence with those fifty words. Sound easy? If you have all the right cards, it can be, especially when a player has a wild card. But the sentences not only have to be grammatically correct, they also have to make sense! Noam Chomsky's famous sentence is one that is grammatically correct, but makes no sense: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
Creating a grammatical sentence that makes sense is just part of the challenge, though. The game ends when one player reaches a score of 200 points. Points are collected by adding up the points for the words the player has used in a sentence. Most words are worth five points, but some are worth ten, some fifteen, and some twenty. (Wild cards are worth zero points). The harder a word is to use in a sentence, the more points it is worth. For example, the card with mystery as he base word has words worth different scores: mystery and mysteries are both worth five points, mystified and mysterious are both worth ten, while mysteriously is worth twenty.
So players try to make not only the longest sentences they can, but the ones that will get them the most points. This leads them to build some pretty "creative" sentences that may be closer to Chomsky's sentence than to sentences most of us would actually use. Any player can challenge the sentence of another player when they think its sense is questionable. The challenged player then has to plead his or her case to the "jury," which consists of the rest of the players. (Little lawyers are perfectly suited to this task!) The jury then decides if the sentence is a legitimate one or a nonsensical one. If the sentence is found legitimate, the player gets all the points for all the words in the sentence, but if it's judged to be nonsense, the player has to take all his or her cards back and gets zero points for that round!
Recommendation
I enthusiastically recommend this game. It is challenging, fun, and educational. Players are challenged to create sentences that will gain them the most points they can get. Some players can get quite creative in the sentences they create as they try to fit words together for the most points, and some of the sentences can be hilarious. The justifications for those sentences can be as entertaining as the sentences themselves! Kids (and adults) can learn about word relations and meanings and can develop some sentence-building skills. The game is easy to learn, but it can take a while for some players to get the idea of creating sentences that will earn them the most points. If everyone plays it safe and just creates sentences they know will not be challenged, much of the fun is lost. Add-ons can be purchased separately for the game for that will allow players to focus on specialized topics.
This award-winning game is fun for the entire family and is perfect for family fun nights.
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