Ransom Notes: The Ridiculous Word Magnet

The Most Satisfying Thing About Revenge

Ransom Notes is a party game for 3 to 6 players, aged 17+ that contains myriad magnetic words used to complete challenges such as writing a convincing argument claiming dinosaurs aren’t real or offering to apply suncream on a rapidly burning stranger on the beach or even answering questions such as what’s the biggest lie you’ve ever told.

My Tuppence Worth

So aside from potentially running out of word magnets and not having more displays to show your sentences on I’m sure you could play with a bigger player count than 6.

Aside from a few choice cards the game can be as risqué or ‘clean’ as you make it with your phrase productions. Sure, to play with teens you might need to go through and take out some of those aforementioned cards with a more adult theme but to make the game 17+ seems a little odd. I mean it just doesn’t have the same “gosh that’s rude” feeling you get when playing Cards Against Humanity. Okay so I don’t actually say “golly gosh” in my general vocabulary but I’m not a rude party games type of player and I found this to be just fine for my temperament.

What ‘s Game About Doing Why

Once you painstakingly separated all the magnetic words. And some are tiny! My poor chubby little fingers could not cope with I or it’s and other 1 to 4 letter words. Grab a handful aiming for around 75 but you don’t have to count, unless you know, you have to, in which case this is going to be a looooong game! Laying out the words in your play area can be a little time consuming and I’ve not yet found a method that works well for grouping and finding words easily to use so I’ve tended to group by word length. Grab your magnetic board and you’re ready to begin.

Turn over the first challenge card, read it aloud to everyone and then frantically begin making your ‘ransom note’ type response. There are a few suggested ways to judge who wins the round but mostly I play with a friendly bunch so we take an honest vote accepting if someone else’s response is genuinely better than our own we vote for it. However, if you are playing with particularly competitive people who will always vote for their own, even if it’s rubbish there are other suggested ways to choose a winner to avoid creating war not peace.

The winner takes the ransom card and the first person to win 5 cards is the winner. It really is that simple.

Components

The magnetic words are alright and being a fridge word building connoisseur I really liked the idea of this but for my liking they were a little bit too much on the small side, which made them hard to manipulate. The surface of the magnetic board you display your words on has edges which makes it hard to get them off after using. If you use the other side your magnetic words are much easier to slide off but then you have the game title, Ransom Notes, as a background rather than a plain black, making it harder to read your response. It was all just very fiddly and seemed a slow process to get everything out and set up. Then finding the words you wanted to use among approximately 75 could be difficult. At one point I barely had any personal pronouns, conjunctions or connectives to use which made stringing sentences together really difficult. Hard word game times no words. Exactly!

How Did Jesus Die

Suffer-ing. I mean seriously, this is how my husband won the game. I took the time and effort to write a historically accurate account of his death. The husbands bestie had no decent words in hand so wrote some drivel! I thought, I’m in here. I’ve won. In a game that is the first to 5 points the bestie had 3, the husband and I were neck and neck with 4 each and he goes and uses suffer and -ing. Those two little magnets cost me victory, dignity and my soul!

Final Thoughts

We enjoyed playing the game but it was quite fiddly and whilst I can see why the magnetic words were so small bigger would have been better for my clumsy fingers. 75ish words is a lot to look through when on a time constraint to make up phrases. This meant that some players, mostly me because I still wanted relatively perfect sentences, could take a longer time causing other players to be left waiting for them to finish. If you want a little bit of fun this could be the game to include in your evening… though the pieces are small so you may still be finding them weeks later if not properly accounted for during each phase of gameplay.

And that concludes our thoughts on Ransom Notes. If you want to buy Ransom Notes today, click here. Let us know what you think on socials @zatugames.