VisualEyes is a game of quick-thinking and creativity. It’s a game that anyone can play, but knowing a whole lot of common phrases will give you the edge you need to win.

The game contains 18 dice that have individual pictures on each side. The dice are rolled, and then everyone around the table tries to find common phrases, like I’ve done in the illustration to the left of this review. In one mode of the game, players have about two minutes to find as many phrases as possible on the dice. After the time is up, everyone compares their word lists. If two or more people came up with the same phrase, they cancel each other out, and if someone came up with a phrase that’s a bit of a stretch, they’re voted down by the other players, but every legitimate phrase earns one point. First person to 20 points wins!

Creativity is encouraged, although bending the pictures too much into other things to try and make them fit a phrase probably won’t work. Playing on words is allowed, which means that “peace” can also be “piece”. You can add small words like “a”, “in”, or “and” to help you. Also, the phrases are only allowed to be two pictures long, so my sentence at the bottom wouldn’t be allowed (whether or not it made the other players laugh).

All things considered, it’s a fun game to play with a few friends, and it usually has some pretty hilarious moments. For instance, on one round that showed two dice with a calendar and a penguin on an iceberg, someone wrote “March of the Penguins”. On another round that had an obese man and a parka, someone suggested Chris Farley’s “Fat Guy in a Little Coat”.

There are a few downsides of this game. For instance, if you play this game too many times in a row, you start noticing a few of the same phrases over and over again, which takes a bit of the fun away. Another point is that it doesn’t work to have large groups of people play this, as it gets difficult for everyone to see the pictures on the dice. It’s also more of an adult game… in my experience, younger kids have a hard time coming up with phrases.

Those, however, are fairly minor compared to the actual fun of the game. If you want to see how well you’d do playing this game, see if you can find other phrases on the dice shown here. What about “papercut”? “Cut time”? “Playing with fire”? “Happy hour”? “Clock face”? “Two-faced”? “Time flies”?…