PICTOMANIA

Designer: Vlaada Chvátil | Publisher: Czech Games Edition

Pictionary is one of the classic party games for a reason: laughing at your friends’ attempts to draw things under pressure, and competitively guessing what the horrible squiggles they produce are meant to be, is great fun. It’d take a brilliant designer to evolve on such a core concept. Fortunately, there’s no question that the famed Vlaada Chvátil (designer of modern classic party game Codenames, among many other games) is up to the job. The terrible drawings and speedy guesses at the heart of Pictionary are still there, but every rule around that carefully improves on the classic. Rather than taking it in turns, everyone gets to draw simultaneously, and you don’t need to be the fastest to be able to guess at everyone else’s – you’ll just get more points if you’re the first correct guess. You’re only allowed to start guessing once you’ve put your pencil down, committing your own drawing where it is, which means faster sketches are rewarded – at least until no-one guesses yours correctly. Then you start thinking about how everyone’s subjects are assigned allows for a spot of deductive reasoning…but now you’re risking spending too long applying a process of elimination. This is a drawing game with opportunity for strategy and tough snap decisions – but still with the opportunity to win by just drawing and guessing well. And if all this is sounding interesting but maybe just a little dry for a party game, just wait for when the third and fourth difficulty level cards get put out. After a first couple of rounds drawing things from object categories like Fruits or Animals, you’ll move on to sketching specific emotions or “Forms of Writing”. Even just seeing the subjects is likely to make your group start laughing at the sheer idea of depicting any of them; when you start seeing your sketches and your guesses, it’ll be as raucous as any other game on this list.