This game has been around for 20 years now and I’m sure most of us have played it.
Do you like playing it?
Do you have any interesting experiences with it?
I’ve find it interesting to play with people who really are artists because while they tend to draw well, they dont draw very fast and they spend too much time on little details. Ex. they will try to use perspective and shadowing.
I love all manner of board and parlor games, including Pictionary. They won’t let my daughter and myself be partners, 'cause we are too much in sync.
Your daughter said that part, didn’t she? 
I haven’t played it in some years. I’m too cutthroat. A six-year-old cheats? Pitched face-first into the snow.
It was fun, though (the game, not the pitching into the snow part. Although…)
My favorite was the following, you have to guess the word that was being described
Pictures drawn:
Chicken
Pole
Tree
The attempted answer? “Tree Pole!” sorry, time’s up.
Shit! I know this! Even without the picture:
Poultry!! :)
:eek::mad::rolleyes:
:p;):D:o:(:smack:
My friends and I have pretty much traded in playing Pictionary for Telephone Pictionary (or Telestrations if you want to spend money on it).
A friend once told us about playing Pictionary with a long-married couple who were amazing in that regard. She said it was almost like this:
1- wife draws a short straight line
2- husband immediately guesses “existentialism”
3- wife says “Right!”
My friends and I have been playing what we call Telestrations Against Humanity. It’s Telestrations (the game “Telephone” except that you switch between drawing and guessing textually every turn), except you draw answers off the white cards in Cards Against Humanity. Usually hilarious, but also ends up with a lot of dicks.
Two of the guesses from the most recent game we played:
“Bird-human about to commit suicide”
“Castration of the alien king”
I remember getting “snifter” as the thing I was supposed to draw. I had no idea what it was. I was far too young to drink the kinds of drinks one would expect to find in a snifter.
A snifter in New Zealand is also a green, sort-of minty lolly with chocolate on the inside. However, given the lolly is a featureless, elongated sphere, drawing it doesn’t really help in Pictionary!
One anecdote from playing in my student days (during the dark ages): the owner of the game had included their own words on one of the blank cards. The group word (i.e. all teams playing) was “the”. Do you know hard it is to draw “the”?
The drawers got really frustrated as the guessers would say it (in a sentence trying to guess/progress), they would get all excited, and we would of course repeat back to them every word in the previous sentence (except all the little ones, like “the”, which we skipped over). From memory, we ran out of time.
Last summer I won a round of Pictionary before the pencil touched the paper.
I was partnered with my teenaged daughter against my sister and my son. My daughter and my sister were drawing. They picked the card and looked at it. My sister asked my daughter “Do you know this?” My daughter rolled her eyes in disgust and said “Uh … yeah.”
So I’m thinking: “What word might my sister not be sure her thirteen-year-old niece would know? And what word would my daughter be annoyed that her aunt thinks she doesn’t know?”
Then I remembered a word that I knew was in the deck because my father missed it years ago even though I did a particularly good drawing.
My sister flipped the timer. “Go!” she said.
“Mascara,” I said.
I won with a blank sheet of paper. It’s not about the drawing. It’s about the psychology of the other players.
The only problem with Pictionary is if you get alot of guessers shouting answers and someone will either shout the correct answer and be missed, or lie about it later and say “I said that” Either way it can be hard to figure out.
I think Pictionary is much more fun when NOT played with the “official” rules… in particular, I find the “all play” rounds terribly uninteresting. OK, everyone try to draw “door” as fast as you can, go!!! It’s also one of those games where having a board is kind of pointless… why move around the board?
So my friends and I play like this. Say it’s 6 players:
(1) each player takes 3 slips of paper, and on each one writes a word or phrase that they would like to see drawn
(2) divide into two teams of 3, each player keeps their 3 written slips of paper face down in front of them
(3) players take turns, alternating between teams. On a player’s turn he picks a face down slip from someone on the other team
(4) that player looks at the word or phrase, and decides whether he thinks it’s “doable”. If so, he will draw it for his team. If the thinks it’s impossible, he then says “challenge”, and whoever wrote the clue has to draw it for HIS team.
(5) The score is based on how quickly it is drawn, with a 2 minute cap, and the scoring reversed for challenges.
So for example, if I pick up a piece of paper that says “zoo”, and I draw a picture of a zoo in 35 seconds, my team gets 1:25 added to its score (2 minutes minus 35 seconds). If I thought zoo was too hard and challenged, and the person who wrote zoo draws it in 50 seconds, then my team gets 0:50 added to its score.
(6) Then add up the total time for each time, highest total time wins.
In general, I think it’s much more interesting to try to draw fairly difficult concepts with a fair bit of time than to draw horse or whatever as fast as possible, and people coming up with their own clues means you can include topical references and inside jokes, but the “Challenge” mechanic punishes people who put things in which are too difficult.
It might be worth mentioning that Pictionary has actually been around for close to 30 years. It was just purchased by Hasbro 20 years ago.
My wife has a favorite story about her dad mixing drawing with charades when his partner couldn’t figure out “Smoky Mountains”.
I played Pictionary with my friends once. There were 4 of us. Unfortunately for all of us, we’re all artists.
So we decided to play Twister instead.
Yes, I like it very much, although I haven’t played it in at least a year or so. I draw pretty well so my team often wins.
I once won a round when the clue was “void.” When the clock started, I put down the pencil and dramatically pointed to the empty piece of paper. My teammates excitedly ran through all the synonyms for “nothing” and got “void” in maybe twenty seconds.
To slightly hijack the thread, since Charades was mentioned and Elendil’s Heir brought up using more of a charades trick than drawing to overcome a particularly hard thing to represent, I was playing charades back when I was 17 and the category was TV shows. I had the unfortunate luck of drawing “ALF” as the show I had to act out in charades.
We were given 60 seconds for our teams to guess. The other team got to see what the person who drew was given, so to keep everyone honest. They were really happy to see my draw.
However, my team got it in about 8 seconds which was the shortest amount of time any individual play took.
How did I do it?
I pointed at my ear, and then pantomimed puking. As my team shouted out various synonyms for it, someone finally said “ralph”. At that point I pointed at them and the answer quickly followed.
Pictionary is one of my favourite games. There are a few similar online games that I used to play with a graphics tablet where you have a few players and they all take turns to draw. You get points when your word is correctly guessed, and you get points for correctly guessing. One version has many word lists you can use: music, films, geography, science, even The Simpsons. One of my favourites is where you get two unrelated words and have to combine them into one scene. Some of them are really tough. I wish I could find my pen…
You can have a lot of fun deliberately drawing things in less obvious ways, too. Once I had the word “ground”. Too simple to draw, so I went with puppies in a mincer.
I also once got banned for some time for a creative interpretation of “manhole”.
Knowing how to get an idea across clearly in a small amount of time is a skill. Some people find it hard to accept they’re not painting a portrait. I’m not great at drawing (especially compared to a lot of people I used to play with), but I like to think I’m better than a lot of good artists at making the intention clear pretty quickly.
Definitely. Also, the game is only 20 years old? It’s just hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that I’m older than it… even if only by a few years.
There’s also a similar game that I’ve found online, “Doodle or Die”. Well, it’s kind of a cross between pictionary and telephone… in fact:
pretty much exactly that… including the penises (peni?).