Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
When I was younger, somewhere between five and eight years old, my family took a few road trips that I still have fond memories of. The era in which these trips took place, the early ‘90s, is worth noting as it’s part of what made these trips memorable.
Before cell phones, tablets, and portable gaming systems were widely available, long road trips were often a struggle to answer the question “How can I entertain/distract myself for X hours?” Surprisingly, my family found a variety of answers, including a “game” involving license plates.
The game consisted of identifying license plates, on cars driving by, from various states in an attempt to find as many as possible during the drive. It was a race of sorts where the first person in our car to point out a new state license plate earned a point and added to their total. When the drive was finished, we tallied up points and declared a winner.
Not only did VNTYPL8S send me on a nostalgic trip down memory lane, but it also turned out to be a fun, laugh-inducing experience for everyone that had a parking spot at the table.
Y00SYRBRN (Use Your Brain)
Gameplay in VNTYPL8S takes place in two phases, a writing phase and a guessing phase, across 3 rounds.
The writing phase comes first and has each player receive an OWN3R (Owner) card and a R3QRMNTS (requirements) card.
OWN3R cards describe a “person” that the players are creating a vanity plate for. Most of these are broad descriptions and reference professions (teacher, firefighter), personality types (pessimist, socialite), or hobbies (skateboarder, car guy). However, some OWN3R cards reference specific characters/individuals such as Batman, Zeus, and Peter Pan.
A standout feature of VNTYPL8S is the massive amount (184) of OWN3R cards. Across my five review plays, I never received the same OWN3R card, which led to a fresh, replayable experience in each game.
The R3QRMNTS cards outline three specific characters, numbers and letters, that need to be used when creating the vanity plate if players want to score additional points during the guessing phase. Each card consists of one number and two letters, for example, LD2.
While there are only 36 R3QRMNTS cards, each one behaves like a ‘check engine light’, forcing players to pause and get creative when building their plate to ensure they use their R3QRMNTS.
Along with the R3QRMNTS, the plate creation rules add another road block for players to maneuver around.
For a plate to be valid for the creator to score points if guessed correctly, it has to meet the following criteria:
- No vowels; Y is allowed
- Only numbers and upper-case letters can be used
- Up to 8 total characters
- No spaces
- No punctuation
- No emoji or other drawings
- No words that are part of the OWN3R card
While the rules as a whole presented a worthy challenge, the first and last rules in the list above stood out as the most difficult to overcome.
I lost track of how many times during the writing phase, players would quickly have an idea for their vanity plate, but have to pump the brakes and change gears due to the no vowel and/or no OWN3R words rules.
While VNTYPL8S presents itself as a party game, the OWN3R cards, R3QRMNTS, and plate creation rules combine to create a fun little puzzle to solve in the writing phase.
Like a hybrid car, VNTYPL8S offers a varied experience. While the writing phase offers the thinky side, the guessing phase is where the party portion goes full speed.
B3P8SHNT (Be Patient)
After all players have finished creating their plates, the guessing phase is ready to begin. In the guessing phase, players reveal their plates one at a time while other players try to guess which OWN3R card belongs to the currently revealed plate.
Before the guessing officially begins, six additional OWN3R cards are shuffled with the players OWN3R cards to create the pool of choices for players to guess from. This step does a good job at adding enough “wrong answers” to make the guessing phase interesting.
The largest group I got to the table in my review plays was five, which meant there were 11 cards to start with at the beginning of the guessing phase. At maximum player count (eight), there would be a hefty pool of 14 cards, creating a more challenging situation than at lower player counts.
After the pool of OWN3R cards is on the table, one player reveals their plate, while others begin guessing which OWN3R card it was written for.
An important rule to note is that during the guessing phase, each player only gets one guess for each revealed plate.
Initially, this rule seemed odd for a party game since for many party games, chaos is often part of the appeal. Letting players guess endlessly seems more fitting for a party game, but ultimately, with a limited pool of choices “only one guess” makes more sense.
What VNTYPL8S lacks in chaos, it more than makes up for with laughs during this phase. After a players plate is first flipped over, all other players immediately start trying to make sense of the jumble of letters and numbers to figure out what it says.
The most common phrase uttered at the table during these moments was, “What in the world does that say?” Guessing players would often try to read the revealed plate out loud, which led to the table collectively sounding like they were speaking some form of gibberish. This step was by far the highlight of each of my games, with laughter erupting from the table as players frequently misread the current plate in hilarious fashion.
On rare occasions, the revealed vanity plate would be easy to understand and lead to a quick successful guess. Most often though, there was usually a minimum of 5 to 10 seconds before players felt confident enough to make a guess.
Each player’s turn in the guessing phase ended in one of two ways. Either the guessing players would correctly guess which OWN3R card belonged to the revealed plate or no successful guess was made.
For a successful guess, the player that made the guess kept the OWN3R card to tally as a point at the end of the game. The player who created the plate would also keep their R3QRMNTS card for a point if they were able to successfully include all the required characters and their plate complied with all plate creation rules.
In the event of unsuccessful guesses by all players, the current player would reveal their associated OWN3R card and return their R3QRMNTS card to the box, missing out on points at the end of the game.
Play continues to the next player, who reveals their plate and kicks off another round of hilarious guessing.
After three rounds of writing and guessing, the game ends, and the player with the most points wins, with ties being broken by the player who earned the most R3QRMNTS cards.
G00DT1M3 (Good Time)
Over my five review plays of VNTYPL8S, I received mixed feedback from the various players that took the ride with me. Some loved the puzzly nature of writing their plates with the well-designed restrictions, while others found it too frustrating and limiting.
For the frustrated players, it’s likely that a more simplistic and less “thinky” word-adjacent party game like Just One or Blank Slate would be a better fit. While I understood the feeling of frustration, I personally found it to not be an issue. Of course, I may be biased given the fact that I have an English Degree and enjoy reading and writing regularly, so I enjoy writing as a creative endeavor.
My only complaint is the built-in timer of three rounds. For a three-player game, this isn’t an issue as players can alternate the order during the guessing phase, ensuring fairness.
At higher player counts, though, players who reveal their plate later in the guessing phase have a higher likelihood of their plate being guessed correctly due to previous players plates being removed.
Ultimately, this is a minor issue and one that we easily solved by making a house rule of playing a number of rounds equal to the number of players to ensure a proper balance during the guessing phase. While this change pushed the game outside of the 20 minute runtime, few people at the table had an issue having more laughs as we played longer than planned.
VNTYPL8S is a game that creatively combines word creation fun with a laugh-inducing guessing race for a wide range of players to enjoy. If this sounds like your dream ride, it’s worth giving it a valet parking spot on your game shelf.
