PERFECT SENSE -- Patch Products

Board Game
3-6 players -- 12 and up
publisher: Patch Products
list price: $29.99

Perfect Sense is packed with clever and witty riddles to tease your brain. The five riddles on each card describe the same object and each riddle relates to one of your five senses. Amaze other players and yourself by solving the riddle after the first clue. Stumped? No problem! Four more riddles will lead you to the correct answer. How quickly can you solve these Riddles That Make Sense? For 3 to 6 players.  [from Amazon.com Product Description]

*****

We received this game from the publisher and were asked to test the product.  

My family of five enjoy gaming, and, as one might expect, it's rare for us to agree on what game to be played as we all have our favorite games and our favorite types of games.  Perfect Sense is popular for one family member.

The game is played such that each card that gets drawn has an item on it, and for each item there is a short, well, poem, for each sense (sight, touch, taste, smell, hearing) that somehow describes, or at least, should lead you to be able to identify the item.  If you guess the item right away on your first poem, you get to move ahead six spaces.  If it takes you two poems, then you move ahead five spaces, etc.  The first player to reach the end of the path wins.

What I don't care for about this game is that the descriptions (poems) tend to be a bit of a stretch.  After all, how do you describe the taste of a a vacuum cleaner or the sound of grass or the smell of nothing?  In some cases, the descriptions are so incredibly easy and obvious that we groan at the luck of the player who gets the clue, and sometimes the descriptions are so generic or unclear there is no way on earth that you would guess the item.  This randomness to the game is frustrating.

It's a little simple for me, and the idea that some cards are nearly impossible to figure out out while others are so obvious makes this less than fun.  However, as long as my young teenage son wants to play it, we'll keep it in the game closet for those family togetherness nights.

Rating: * *