Designed by: Vlaada Chvátil
In Pictomania, everyone is drawing, but in a hurry: everyone is guessing each other’s drawings too.
Three word cards showing a number of related words (eg animals, places, recipes) are laid out on a display so everyone can see them, and everyone is dealt a letter and number card that corresponds to the display: if you’re dealt B3, for example, your word is the third one down on the second card. These are what everyone draws. As soon as everyone’s ready, you begin drawing!
Once you’re finished drawing, you now guess the other players’ drawings, doing so by placing a guessing card on top of that particular player’s word cards. Note that your guessing card only shows a number; when guessing, the letters are ignored. You don’t even have to wait for them to finish drawing, but once you’ve made a guess, you can’t change it!
Once you’ve finished guessing, you can grab one of the black point tokens from the centre of the table – these are different values, so there’s a benefit to being quickest – before all the secret words are revealed. Players have their own point tokens that they reward to correct guesses – again, guessing quicker is better – but if there’s an incorrect guess no token is awarded. Points are tallied as all the points you gathered (correct guesses plus black tokens) minus any of your own that you didn’t give away, because other players guessed incorrectly.
There are four rounds in the game and, although you can house-rule for younger players, the default is to use a different deck of progressively harder-to-draw cards over each round! At the end of the game, the player with the most points is the winner.
None, although the tempo of the game is kind of manic and that in itself can feel a bit take-that-y
There's none. You're either drawing, guessing, or cursing the inability to draw or guess
Very low on the rules, although on the first play the scoring seems a bit fiddly it all makes sense.
There's a big deck of cards and the selection system for words is, of necessity, random. We wouldn't want to play it too many times because of the real-time dynamic, but it certainly has huge built-in variation in terms of what words come out and get assigned.
3-6
Players
8+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
A fun drawing game with a canny point-scoring system, where I think a lot of the fun arises out of the harder-to-draw and harder-to-guess rounds over the easier opening round. As such, there's a sense of mania not just to the fact the game is a series of real-time races, but also the madness of trying to draw a phrase or concept - rather than a noun - as quickly as possible. So it works best as an experience when it doesn't work as a game, if that makes sense: players collapsing in laughter or having micro-breakthrough moments when something actually *makes sense*. Points are a good fuel to keep the engine running, but this is one of those games where the winning and losing isn't really important to the play.