You've Been Sentenced

No story ideas? Writer's block? I have a recommendation.

Today I played a great game called You've Been Sentenced. It comes in a pentgram-shaped box and is filled with pentagram-shaped cards. LOTS of cards. Each card has a word on each of the five sides.

Each player receives ten cards, and the race is on to construct coherent, grammatical sentences from the cards. Most have variations on a single word: flat, flatter, flatten, flattest flattening. Others contain names, nouns, or handy prepositions. There are also many wild cards. Each word is worth a certain point value.

Once a player has constructed a sentence, they may set the timer, and all players have to finish before it runs out. Then each sentence is judged on whether it is acceptably grammatical, and points are totalled. The real fun, of course, is reading the sentences people have cobbled together out of the random words.

As best I can remember, here are a few of the sentences we came up with during the game.

Harry S. Truman moodily kicked ducks in the end zone.

Powerful cats fantasize about Washington DC.

The river flamed and totally freaked out Dr. Martin Luther King.

Noise loves to slide around sharpened minds.

Her lips matched.

I wish I had taken notes during the game, because many of those forced sentences had a strange poetry about them, or at least the hint of a story lying behind them for the one who took the time to mull them over.

Looks like another no-rewriting weekend, as tomorrow I'm off to a cousin's wedding, and Sunday I promised to finish proofreading my brother's new role-playing game.