As you know, Mad Libs is an interactive storytelling activity in which one player prompts others for a list of words to substitute for blanks in a story, before reading the – often comical or nonsensical – story aloud. The game is frequently played as a party game or as a pastime. The game was invented in the United States, and more than 110 million copies of Mad Libs books have been sold since the series was first published in 1958. Amazingly, there was no non-book version of Mad Libs until the Mad Libs card game a couple of years ago, and now Fully Baked Ideas gives us the Adult version, appropriately entitled Adult Mad Libs. I have been a big fan of Mad Libs since a wee lad, and I enjoy scandalous humor, so I was excited to see this new release. Does it live up to its name? Let's take a look.
The premise of the Mad Libs game, and its naughtier Adult sibling, is that decks of cards containing various parts of speech (and some containing sentences with some words "blanked out") replace the booklet of page-long vignettes that comprised the original Mad Libs activity. This concerned me at first, as I thought taking the creativity out of the game would rob it of its fun. I was pleasantly surprised to find that using the pre-made cards does, in fact, make the game fun - the game has good content and a lot of flexibility in the rules to ensure you get the cards you need. There are always multiple "blanks" in the sentence, so it's all about finding words that work well together - you still have creative control.
The core of Adult Mad Libs is taking innocent words and bending them to your will to create double entendres. (If you've seen the film "Shrek," it used the same ploy to create a film kids and adults could appreciate on different levels). Some responses would go right over a kid's head, as there are no "bad words" in the deck. This is a clever way to do a game because it's funny without being offensive. Too many party games in recent years have jumped on the offensive/filthy/sexual/political/insulting bandwagon, while Adult Mad Libs is just good clean dirty fin. It succeeds where the old game "Dirty Minds" fails, by creating many possibilities for card combinations rather than one series of clues which, once you've heard them all, are useless.
We got a lot of laughs out of Adult Mad Libs. I recommend you break it out at your next party game gathering.
The premise of the Mad Libs game, and its naughtier Adult sibling, is that decks of cards containing various parts of speech (and some containing sentences with some words "blanked out") replace the booklet of page-long vignettes that comprised the original Mad Libs activity. This concerned me at first, as I thought taking the creativity out of the game would rob it of its fun. I was pleasantly surprised to find that using the pre-made cards does, in fact, make the game fun - the game has good content and a lot of flexibility in the rules to ensure you get the cards you need. There are always multiple "blanks" in the sentence, so it's all about finding words that work well together - you still have creative control.
The core of Adult Mad Libs is taking innocent words and bending them to your will to create double entendres. (If you've seen the film "Shrek," it used the same ploy to create a film kids and adults could appreciate on different levels). Some responses would go right over a kid's head, as there are no "bad words" in the deck. This is a clever way to do a game because it's funny without being offensive. Too many party games in recent years have jumped on the offensive/filthy/sexual/political/insulting bandwagon, while Adult Mad Libs is just good clean dirty fin. It succeeds where the old game "Dirty Minds" fails, by creating many possibilities for card combinations rather than one series of clues which, once you've heard them all, are useless.
We got a lot of laughs out of Adult Mad Libs. I recommend you break it out at your next party game gathering.
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