A creative party game for making hilariously terrible sentences. Players respond to outlandish situations like "Tell someone you've clogged their toilet at a party" with just their limited pool of word magnets, leaving even master wordsmiths no choice but to create awesomely horrendous phrases. With hundreds of word magnets included, every round is always fresh, wildly creative, and tears-streaming-down-your-face funny.
Each round, a prompt card is randomly drawn from the deck and players try to come up with the best answer from their pool of magnets. A judge is randomly chosen from the players, who reviews the answers and chooses a winner, who scores 1 point. The game ends after one player has scored 5 points. Players can also choose to take turns being the judge each round.
Edo's Ransom Notes Review
- A hit with family and played well with three generations
- Easy to play and teach
- Restrictions with words enable creativity
- Promotes creativity and witty responses
- Can be expensive for the box size
- Some words and potential statements can be inappropriate for younger audiences, requiring parental review
- The game doesn't come with a timer, but one could be used
- Creating ransom notes using magnetic words
- Apples to Apples
- Cards Against Humanity
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Prompt and Answer — Players draw a card with a prompt (e.g., a political complaint, a plan for the zombie apocalypse) and create a statement based on it.
- Social deduction/judgment — One player acts as the judge to determine the best statement among those submitted by others, with a mechanism for veto.
- Word Building — Players use a collection of magnetic words to construct answers or statements.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- magnetic words meets Apples to Apples
- real crowd pleaser
- what's nice about it is you do have some restrictions with the words but that enables a lot of creativity
References (from this video)
- accessible and humorous social interaction
- easy to teach and quick to play
- humor-dependent; not for players who dislike improvisation
- humor and social interaction
- party game setting with tiles and prompts
- playful
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- tile drafting — draw magnetic tiles from a bag and use them to craft humorous responses to prompts
- topic-based prompts — topics guide the humorous responses
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- It is the silliest dexterity game that is so fun.
- This has been a classic for me.
- It looks so cool on the table as you can see.
- I am super excited for both of those and I'm sure that they will fit great into my collection.
References (from this video)
- High creativity and group laughter
- Accessible and lighthearted
- Contains mature prompts in some versions
- Requires curation of prompts for family groups
- Wordplay and punchlines
- Creative prompts using word magnets on a fridge-like board
- Humorous and creative prompts with magnets
- Telestrations
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Magnet-based word construction — Players place word magnets to craft prompts or punchlines.
- prompt-based storytelling — Players respond to prompts with their magnet words.
- Storytelling — Players respond to prompts with their magnet words.
- Word Building — Players place word magnets to craft prompts or punchlines.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Party games are one of the biggest, most important parts of a versatile collection.
- Telestrations has created some of the funniest moments you can have at a table.