Overall – The You’ve Been Sentenced Board Game Received A Total Rating Of 5 Out Of 5 – Based On 3 Reviews.
The game has been designed and bought to you by McNeill Designs for Brighter Minds, the same people who bought you the highly rated Twisted Fish card game as well as the Wheel of Ghore-ture game.
McNeill Designs for Brighter Minds is a company which was founded back in 2004, launching their own series of innovative games onto the marketplace which have since gone on to receive several awards. Their flag ship game being You’ve Been Sentenced which alone has received over 10 national awards.
About The Game Play
The standard game comes complete with the following:
- Colorful and attractive outer packaging
- 5 sets of “Word” cards displaying 5 words/phrases, totalling 540 cards with over 2,500 words
- A single egg timer
- A score pad and pencil
This word / education board game is designed for those aged 8 and up and requires between 3 and 10 players, the more players you have the funnier the game becomes as the game goes on.
The game takes about 10 seconds to set up, each player draws a set of 10 cards at random from the 5 piles of available cards in the game box. Each player then takes their 10 chosen cards and places them face up on the table in front of them, this doesn’t need to be done in secret since each player will have a different set of words and will be working on their own solution.
Each of the 10 cards you select will contain 5 words/phrases, each of which is attached to a certain number of points. The overall aim of the game is to come up with a sensible sentence using as many of your cards as possible to achieve the highest score possible.
The first person to create what they consider an acceptable sentence is the first one to turn over the egg timer, at that point all of the remaining players must then complete their own sentences before the sand timer runs through. If you’re the first one to create your sentence and turn the sand timer then you’re not allowed to change your sentence, you will however receive a 10 point bonus if your sentence is accepted by the other players.
Each sentence is then accepted or rejected in turn by the remaining players, if an “objection” is made to your sentence you will have to justify it by explaining the meaning of your sentence out loud. The “jury” will then vote as to whether they think you should receive the points. The first player to reach 200 points will become the “sentence champion” and win the game.
The game is advertised as taking around 30-40 minutes to play, whilst this might be accurate we found that we played for much longer periods, often not realizing we’d surpassed the 200 point requirement, simply because the game gets quite competitive.
The Expansions
You’ve Been Sentenced has something which no other word game that we know of has and that’s expansion packs. The expansion packs are add-on decks of cards which contain topic specific words and phrases which allow you to come up with even more sentences, these currently include:
- [easyazon-link asin=”B0062APC5K”]Brain Buster Add-On Deck[/easyazon-link]
- [easyazon-link asin=”B0062AJGWU”]Sports Highlights Add-On Deck[/easyazon-link]
- [easyazon-link asin=”B0062AP3WW”]Gourmet Cuisine Add-On Deck[/easyazon-link]
- [easyazon-link asin=”B0062AJEKY”]Pop Culture Add-On Deck[/easyazon-link]
- [easyazon-link asin=”0641843224″]Sci-fi And Fantasy Add-On Deck[/easyazon-link]
- [easyazon-link asin=”B0062AJHE2″]NASA Space Terminology Add-On Deck[/easyazon-link]
These decks do several things; they prevent the game from becoming stale, they offer new life to the game when you’ve owned it for a while, they offer a lot more variation and they provide more interesting game play for those interested in a particular subject area.
