LogFAQs > #935224525

19. Pictomania (2011)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Party game, drawing, real-time, deduction, separate hands
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 30 minutes
Experience: 7-10 games over 5-8 sessions with 4, 6 players (2019-2020)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Each player is secretly assigned a word to draw (based on a master list that everyone can see). You earn points by finishing your picture before others, by being guessing others' pictures successfully (and before others), and by having others guess your picture successfully. The game is played over four rounds, and the words to draw get harder each round (i.e. in round 1, you might have to draw distinct animals like a cat and a rabbit, but in round 4 might have to distinguish between a wolf and a dog.)

Design - Pictomania is fantastic. Real-time games are great, and drawing is great. Synthesizing the two isn't always that easy to do in game form; Pictionary, for example, feels distinctly card-draw-dependent/has a poor game component. Meanwhile, Telestrations seems like a vessel for chaos and not really a game at all. Pictomania rewards you both as an artist and a guesser, and its controlled chaos is just about perfect. The question isn't how well you can draw in a time limit, but rather how quickly you can draw while scoring points. It's a great equalizer for those that do not fancy themselves artists.

That said, it may swing a little too far in the opposite direction. Pictomania's scoring system probably overly incentivizes speed versus drawing, in my opinion. The trouble is that being first to guess each player's drawing is worth up to three points, and being first to finish is another three points. On the flip-side, you actually have diminishing returns to everyone guessing your picture correctly - it's worth 3 points when the first person guesses your pic, but subsequent correct guesses give fewer and fewer. It really lowers the incentive to draw a clearly recognizable picture.

While each round of Pictomania is entirely independent of the other rounds, Vlaada Chvatil, the designer, did an amazing job picking the cards. Early rounds have really simple pictures and will literlaly have people grabbing for the completion tokens within ten seconds. Later rounds will have at least a few players just throwing their hands up in frustration of how to draw period, a few lucky/ingenious artists illustrating their points quickly and effectively, and the embattled few who will communicate an abstract concept effectively but wind up scoring very few points because they finished last.

Experience - It seems almost unfair that I only discovered Pictomania so recently. I love pretty much everything about it, and it's a party game that can be played with as few as four players.

Future - Pictomania hasn't got quite as many reps on it as my long-time favorites that will dominate the top of this list, but it might rank among the highest of my want-to-play party games that I've actually played a fair amount. There's a slight worry of the cards getting stale, but I'm not overly concerned. Would buy if it weren't for my friend's owning it; it's become one of my favorite endings to a four-player game night.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness