Designed by: Florian Sirieix
What’s Missing? is a drawing game played over seven rounds. Each player has a pad with a sheet of transparent plastic, and a pen with which to draw. In every round, all the players take a card and – without letting anyone else see the card – place it under the plastic, and draw around it, in essence trying to clue whatever is on the card by simply drawing the context. A football might have a boot swinging at it. A whale might have a sea line with a fishing boat above it. A fork might occupy the empty spot next to a knife and spoon.
Once everyone but one player has finished drawing, that player gets ten more seconds to finish before – one at a time – the drawings are revealed without the card. If you drew the knife and the spoon, for instance, you’re waiting for someone to guess ‘fork’. That player keeps the card face-up as a point. Which might make you incentivised to not draw well, or obviously, but if nobody guesses your word, you lose a point.
Once all words have been guessed (or given up on!) a new round begins. After the final round the player with the most points wins.
None.
Very little. The only down-time is waiting for other players to finish drawing, should you be quicker.
There's some challenge in identifying, but the default is more about speed-of-thought than canny tactical or strategic thinking. The rules couldn't be simpler.
There are numerous cards, and obviously what you draw is entirely up to you.
3-6
Players
6+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
I really wanted to like this, and I really thought I was going to. I like silly drawing games and I like an element of deduction. I like the faintly ludicrous premise and the occasional tangle of logical knots players can get into when guessing wrong. Unfortunately for some reason that I can't put my finger on, it fell flat for us. I think perhaps because the hidden answers often fell into one extreme (very easy to guess) or the other (very hard) and the elusive in-between of those felt like where most of the potential fun of the game was lying. When those moments happened, the times where the guessers knew they were in the right ballpark and just frantically searching for the connection - it was fun. But there was, for us, not enough of them to compare favourably with something like the - admittedly more manic - Doodle Rush, or the bizarre deduction experience of A Fake Artist Goes to New York, or the unswervable simple genius of Telestrations. A really interesting idea though.