A game that focuses on sentences, for fun?

June 4, 2010 9:18 AM

Is there a board game that relies on building sentences for game play, but not in a "teach people how to construct sentences" way and is not Mad Libs?

I have a love hate affair with Scrabble. It's neat to play, but the focus on stand alone words without any context to each other in meaning continues to bother me, despite playing a lot over the past few months.

Often I want to play a word that that goes with another word to create a phrase or sentence as opposed to pulling a word out the air just cause it scores a bunch of points. Ideally, it would be fun to have a Scrabble like game where you pull WORDS from a bag and use them to create interesting sentences or phrases (yes, this would need to be an impossibly big bag).

So, does a game with a focus on building coherent sentences (with a side goal of writing) exist? Preferably it would be a board game you can could play with 2-4 people. A digital version of such a game is fine too.

No, I'm not looking for Mad Libs.

posted by Brandon Blatcher to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (12 answers total)

Best answer: I can't find a link to it but I have a game at home that is Scrabble branded and is called maybe Scrabble Cubes, or Scrabble Dice? Here's a picture of it. It's fun, but somewhat limited due to its open-endedness. Like magnetic poetry with dice.
posted by dirtdirt at 9:22 AM on June 4, 2010

Balderdash? It's about creating made-up definitions for nonsense words and trying to pass them off as true. There is an element of writing and constructing sentences as you have to come up with valid-sounding definitions.
posted by amethysts at 9:47 AM on June 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

Perhaps not exactly what you're looking for, but still possibly up your alley:

Hotel Rwanda Sykes is a game my friends and I made up. Essentially it's a long list of pop culture references piggy-backed on top of each other. For instance, if there are three people playing, the first couple rounds would look like this:

Person 1: "Carrot Top."
Person 2: "Carrot Top-anga Lawrence"
Person 3: "Carrot Top-anga Lawren-Samuel L Jackson"
Person 1: "Carrot Top-anga Lawren-Samuel L Jackson Pollack"

The game is won by the first person to bring the list back to its first entry. A winning move on the game above would be:

Person 2: "Carrot Top-anga Lawren-Samuel L Jackson Polla-Carrot Top"

posted by The White Hat at 9:48 AM on June 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Yes, it's called You've Been Sentenced.
posted by Knowyournuts at 9:50 AM on June 4, 2010

Often I want to play a word that that goes with another word to create a phrase or sentence as opposed to pulling a word out the air just cause it scores a bunch of points. Ideally, it would be fun to have a Scrabble like game where you pull WORDS from a bag and use them to create interesting sentences or phrases (yes, this would need to be an impossibly big bag).

Talkin' Tango is the only game that I've played where the point was to make up individual sentences, although it's not exactly similar to Scrabble. The point of the game is to describe a secret word by alternating back and forth with a partner for each word or the description, so it's closer to Pictionary or charades than Scrabble.

VisualEyes is closer to your grab bag of words description, but you don't really make up full sentences. There are a bunch random images on the sides of dice, and you have to come up with common phrases that can be made from two of them (so a picture of a flame and another of a person's head could be combined to make "hot head").
posted by burnmp3s at 9:54 AM on June 4, 2010

Pseudobabble sounds like exactly what you're looking for. But you can't play against people within your house, and the quality of the game really hinges on the quality of your opponents. I played it for a while and 10% of the time it was hilarious and fun, and the other 90% of the time it was just frustrating because the sentences that other players would vote for were totally banal things like "I put the cup on the coaster."
posted by pluckemin at 9:55 AM on June 4, 2010

(I mean, it's still fun to come up with wacky sentences, but it's annoying if you're the only one and if no one actually seems to appreciate it. It's like playing Apples to Apples with someone who insists that the adjectives have to literally describe the noun.)
posted by pluckemin at 9:58 AM on June 4, 2010

Scrabble Sentence Cube Game isn't made any more, but you can get a used copy of it.

Apples to Apples isn't about building sentence - but it does focusing on connecting words based on meaning, so it might work for you.
posted by Dojie at 10:03 AM on June 4, 2010

I've been wanting to pick you You've Been Sentenced for a couple of years now. It sounds like exactly what you're looking for, but I've never played it.

In a Pickle might interest you. It's not exactly about sentence construction, but the shifting contexts in which words become playable by relating to other words are interesting (and often entertaining.)
posted by usonian at 10:03 AM on June 4, 2010

Best answer: There is the classic improv exercise, word-at-a-time story. Looking up a Wikipedia reference for that brought up Cheddar Gorge.
posted by mhum at 11:46 AM on June 4, 2010

Some of my Scrabble-playing pals have experimented with house rules involving some or all of the words on the board in a sentence. Often while drunk.
posted by box at 1:28 PM on June 4, 2010

Involving using all the words, that is.
posted by box at 1:43 PM on June 4, 2010