Game Review: You’ve Been Sentenced (as seen on NBC10 Philadelphia)

Posted by Jeff on December 4, 2011 at 10:02 pm

Why hello there, stranger!

If you found your way here as a result of my spot on the NBC10 5 o’clock evening news with Tracey Davidson, I’d like to personally welcome you to Out With The Kids. If you have no idea what that last sentence is about, that’s cool. You can totally stick around as well. The more the merrier!

I was featured on NBC10 Philadelphia on Friday, December 2nd reviewing the fine game You’ve Been Sentenced from Delaware-based indie toy maker McNeill Designs. Here’s the spot, recorded off my parent’s DVR (thanks Mom & Dad) with my iPhone. How hi-tech of me:

The game is a riot because it combines the best parts of Scrabble and Mad Libs and has you thinking fast and thinking creativity.

For avid OWTK-ers, You’ve Been Sentenced is a winning mix of two of our faves: Rory’s Story Cubes and Dabble. But instead of being 100% imaginative with picture cubes and without arranging single letters to form a disparate batch of words, here you have 10 cards / 50 words in total per round to make as big and bizarre a sentence as you possibly can. You’ll be judged (like in court, get it) by your opponents on the validity of your sentence both from a grammatical sense and a sensible sense. Each word has a point value and the total of all the words in your sentence is your score for each round. Squeezing higher value words like ‘shapely’ into your sentences will vault you to the 200 points needed to win quicker and thus allow you to dominate your feeble-minded foes. Umm, or just make the sentences more robust and silly. Either one.

Here’s my best sentence to date:

The results of this fast paced game can be funny, curious, brilliant, or even lightly off-color (that was totally the Mrs, not me. I swear) but no matter what sentences are formed, the action is fantastic. I love You’ve Been Sentenced and I think you may also.

If you’ve got a young reader/author/storyteller in your family, the odds are quite excellent that You’ve Been Sentenced is going to score bigtime. And with specialized add-on decks containing words relating to: NASA, Gourmet Cuisine, Sci-fi/Fantasy, Pop Culture, and Sports, gameplay can be tailored to one’s particular interest or hobby, and there’s virtually no end to the number of sentences you’ll be able to construct.

*OWTK received a copy of You’ve Been Sentenced for review consideration. The opinions above are honest and unbiased.