Pictomania Board Game First Impressions
Pictomania is a very hard game…
…and that’s just trying to clean the whiteboards!
Pictomania is a drawing game in which everyone is both drawing and guessing at the same time, giving a chance for those who excel only at one or the other skill to crush the dreams of other players.
In this game, a bunch of cards with random ‘things’ on them are laid out on a rack, above a symbol… Overlooked by Eeyore and Tigger in this case.
Each player gets 2 cards, one symbol and 1 number. These let you know which word you are going to be drawing…
So, using the below card combination on the above rack of cards, my word is ‘there’.
Then, you have to start drawing your word, while SIMULTANEOUSLY guessing what the other players are drawing.
Voting
You have ‘voting’ cards that you use to place face down in front of your opponent and the quicker you guess, the more points you’ll score if you’re correct. There is only one of each number and symbol so in this case, I can eliminate the card on the ‘poke-ball’ looking symbol and any number 5…
When you finish drawing and guessing you take a point token from the middle of the table. When they’ve all been taken the round ends.
Then you reveal who was right and who was wrong. If you’re correct you get 1 or 2 points depending on how quick you were guessing. If you’re wrong you put your card in the middle of the table.
Scoring
Once all this is done you look to see who has the most incorrect guesses, the point token they took from the middle of the table becomes minus points for the round. So you add up all your points, also counting the point tokens that other players didn’t take as negative (you need to make everyone guess you drawing too!) and score the most points over 5 rounds.
Pictomania Summary
I’ve seen this described as ‘Gamer Pictionary’ and I agree. It definitely takes that cool Telestrations thing and makes a game of it, but it doesn’t replace it entirely.
Drawing well enough to players know what you’re drawing while looking at what everyone else is doing. There are 42 words, you can eliminate the card and number you have leaving 30… and they’re deliberately very similar.
Some are TOO similar, like when one of the people in this game got ‘Axe’ and was very confident 🙂
So to sum up. If you like this kind of party game and want a good laugh, give this one a go. But keep some water handy, those whiteboards do not clean easy.
Jesta ThaRogue
