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Players: 3-6 (ages 12+)
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Remember how your middle school English teacher always steered you away from rhyming in your poetry? Well, fear not—because Perfect Sense is the board game that will fulfill all your rhyming needs through riddles that rely on your senses of taste, touch, sight, sound, and smell.
To start, an opposing player selects a card containing five riddles—all of which describe the same object. Next, you roll a die to see from which category the starting riddle will be. The opposing player then reads the corresponding riddle on a card. If you guess right, you get to move your playing piece five spaces on the game board. If you’re wrong, your opponent keeps reading riddles until all five have been read or until you’ve answer correctly. The more riddles read before you can answer correctly, the less spaces you get to move on the game board. The first person to reach the finish line is the winner.
While adults might find that the riddles are generally easy to answer, the questions are funny and cute, and kids will surely get a kick out of reading and answering them. The rules are also very easy to follow, which will make it a breeze for kids to play. Plus, with five chances to answer each question, players have a lot of opportunities to piece the riddles together, like a puzzle.
One of the major downsides to this game, however, is that the spaces on the game board are fairly large. Since you have the possibility of moving your playing piece up to five spaces on every turn, the game can be over considerably faster than you’d expect.
The die adds an interesting component to the game. The five senses are listed on five sides of the die, but there’s a question mark on the sixth side. If you roll the question mark, you have a few options to consider before the game continues. You can choose a sense for the first riddle read, and play continues as normal. However, you can also choose to challenge another player. In that case, you, the challenger, and the challenged player both answer the riddles on your card. Answer correctly first, and you swap places with the challenged player on the board. If the challenged player answers first, then the playing pieces remain where they are, and your turn is over. Challenging can really pay off for you in the end, and it adds extra elements of competitiveness and risk that take this game beyond a basic Q&A game.
In the end, Perfect Sense is a great game that allows older kids to exercise their minds while having fun. It’s like sneaking zucchini into your chocolate cake: they’ll never notice the difference, and they’ll still enjoy every bit of it.
