Telephone Pictionary

I played Telephone Pictionary for the first time yesterday. What a great and hilarious game. The rules are as follows: one person writes down a phrase or a sentence on a sheet of paper. This paper is passed to the next person who must draw a picture depicting the sentence. Then this is passed to a third person who must decipher the picture and try to guess the original phrase or sentence. This alternation continues until the stack of paper makes its way all the way back to the person who first wrote the sentence. The more people you have playing, the greater the chances that the original sentence will turn into something completely unrelated or absurd. The sentence may evolve many many times as well.

Since you don't want to wait forever for your turn, when you actually play, everyone starts with a stack of a paper. There should be the same number of sheets of paper as there are people playing in every stack. This way everyone can write down an initial sentence. Then you rotate the stacks by passing the stack to your left (or right). So when you receive the stack from your right you can read the sentence, place that sheet at the bottom of the stack and draw the clue. So after a complete rotation everyone should have their original stack completed and can see the progression and at what point the chain breaks down.

So for example, one person started with "bouncing balls," which for a few iterations were drawings of a ball taking a few bounces. At some point someone decided to be difficult and wrote "what goes up must come down." This eventually led to "erectile dysfunction" and slowly became even more perverted. One started off with "hottest vp, coolest state." The gist of the sentence survived quite a few iterations, until someone wrote "vpilf," which somehow turned into "romantic dinner" and then became about "falling in love." The best ones are the ones where the initial clue is simple but becomes completely absurd. One started with "tragic clown" and became "I hear you knocking, but I won't answer" halfway through. However, my initial sentence was "it's so damn hot, milk was a bad choice." This was too complicated and doomed to failure at the get go. It quickly became "a melting snowman reaches for the bottle, but a sheep stops him," and by the end became "dirt in a flower pot," which wasn't quite as amusing. We played with 17 people, so you can imagine how unlikely the original sentence was going to remain intact. But one did actually survive: "bungie jumping off the golden gate bridge." At least the bungie jumping part did.

I played this at Albatross which was interesting in it of itself. It's a pub where they have board games you can play while you drink, but ironically the best thing about Telephone Pictionary is that all you need is pen and paper. Albatross also has quite a few dart boards lined up like a shooting range, which I must master. And there is popcorn. It was certainly quite interesting and a bit difficult to draw while buzzed.