We've played the license plate game for years. Attempt to come up with words using the three letters in a license plate, in sequence, with the shorter words being preferred. It's a fun way to pass time while on the road.

And it ought to be a fine board game, but it just hasn't worked. Many attempts have been made with the most recent being Word Whiz and this offering. The former misses slightly due to mechanics, but this one misses entirely due to odd rules.

The rules state that each player has 3 letter cards face up before them. A timer is let loose and everyone comes up with their best, shortest word for each of the three-letter combinations on the table. So far, so good. And frantic, too, as the timer seems to be way short of the one-minute it's billed as.

Then comes the reckoning phase. Each player gets to start the 'bidding' on their three-letter combo. If anyone else at the table wrote down a shorter word using those three letters, they claim so at this point and 'steal' the honors for this combo. That all makes sense. The silly part is that everyone can keep looking at the cards trying to come up with a better word, for as long as they like. When they see a better answer, they write it down and spit it out, 'stealing' the honor of scoring for this word. This continues until everyone concedes that there is likely no better word or everyone falls asleep.

Then it's on to the next player's letters. After everyone has had a chance to gobble up the honor of presenting the shortest word for each combo, it's still not over. Until a majority of players deem that all combinations have their best words, players can still take scoring honors by finding better words. It could drag on for days.

After exactly one play, our group decided that the timer should have a real purpose and that once the timer is exhausted, there is no more writing. This speeds up the game and grants points to those who can actually come up with words during the timed portion, but still can't salvage the fact that it just doesn't work. The game has no second-level tiebreaker. If words are of equal length and equal number vowels (e.g. STAR and STIR, which should win? According to the rules, it's whoever blurts one out first. According to us, it's a tie and no one gets the points, but our belief is that there should be another tiebreaker (lowest alphabetically?).

So, it's a noble attempt to structure the familiar road game, but like all attempts before, it falls short of the mark.