Mad Libs: The Game (Looney Labs)

I was a big nerd growing up. Okay, let's be honest. I am still a big nerd. I love words and wordplay and always have. I played many games of Scrabble with family and friends. I also did a lot of word searches, crosswords, and Mad Libs. For those of you who don't remember, Mad Libs was a story that had a lot of blanks on it. One person would ask you for a noun, adjective, verb, etc. and fill in the blanks for you. Once all the blanks were filled in, they would hand you your filled in paper to read your hilarious and nonsensical story. Looney Labs has recently published Mad Libs: The Game. It is designed for 3-8 players, takes about 20 minutes to play, and retails for $20.

Setup
1. Shuffle the deck of Word cards and deal seven to each player.
2. Shuffle the deck of Sentence cards and place it in the center of the table next to the Word deck.

Game Play - The game plays over several rounds until one player gets 3 points and wins.
1. Flip over the top card from the Sentence deck and read it aloud.
2. Each player picks cards from their hand, providing one Word card for each blank on the Sentence card. (Note: The words must match the blank in terms of part of speech, i.e., noun, verb, etc.)
3. Players take turns reading the sentence they formed with their chosen words, making tense fit where necessary.
4. After all the sentences are read, players simultaneously vote on which sentence they liked the best, not voting for themselves. The winner receives one point.
5. Before you start the next round, players may discard any Word cards from their hand they don't like, and then re-draw back up to seven.

Review
Depending on how many people you play with, will determine how long the game takes to play. If only a few people, it's easy for someone to quickly get three points. If more people, it could take a little while longer. With 42 Sentence cards and 200 Word cards, there is also some degree of replay value in this game, as you will never get the exact same combination of cards in your hand to match the sentence card. With that being said, this game screams for an expansion of more cards, which seems easy enough to accomplish, if this game takes off. That being said, I think this game could have been better designed. Half the fun of Mad Libs is you never know what kind of sentence you are going to end up making. I would have made the Sentence cards double sided. On one side, it tells you what types of blanks you need to fill in, and then after everyone picks their word cards, you flip the Sentence card over and people reveal their sentences. This game is fun for kids and family gatherings, but it could have been better.

This game was provided to me for free by Looney Labs in exchange for an honest review.