Game Reviews: Mensa Mind Games®, year 2007

You've Been Sentenced!

• Replay Value (1-10): 5
• Fun Factor (1-10): 6
• Worth Buying (1-10): 5

The game comes with a very large deck of five-sided cards. Many of the cards contain five words or phrases that are based on the same word, but of different parts of speech: for example, "chicken", "chicken-like", "chickening out", "chickens", "chickened out". There's also a liberal helping of pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions. Each player is dealt ten cards and try to make a sentence with the cards. Each word or phrase has a score value (usually 5, but trickier phrases like "chickening out" can be worth 10 points), and there's a bonus for using all your cards. The other players get to review the sentence for correctness, but the game rules are somewhat vague if all that is needed is for the sentence to be grammatically correct, or if the sentence actually has to make sense too.

The game is probably educational, but as a game among adults, it doesn't have much charm. Perhaps this is because minor grammatical mistakes just aren't very amusing. The game isn't very competitive, since all players are basically working on different sets of words. There are a few inconsistencies in the cards (some cards are careful and say "a or an", while others don't when the indefinite article is given), and there are occasional errors (I saw "Charlie Chaplain" on one card, for example). The pentagonal cards themselves are a bit hard to manipulate, but if you do want five choices on a card and a sentence to be readable when you fan them, it's actually a pretty good design.