It Slices! It Dices!

It appears that this year "Pictionalmost" will be my personal contribution, my "zero-dollar specialty," as I call the kind of gifts someone gives because they have the talent, the guts, the whatever-it-is-it-takes to give it.

I'm not an artist. I'm a terrible poet.

I can, however, make a good Pictionary-style game with the details of the Birthday Individual for the hilarious sketching of others.

You can try it, too.

My methodology:

A good-sized game will include 50 cards. I did 100 for Our Sweetie, but I did only 50 for Rainbow K this weekend.

Ten categories, five-to-ten cards per category.

It sounds like a lot, but it isn't. How do I come up with this much?

1. Get a small notebook. Number each page from 1-8 (if doing 5/category, or 1-14 if doing 10/category) for ten pages. You'll use more.

2. Start naming categories by interests of your subject. Feel free to have a "love/hate" or a "potpourri" category.

3. Brainstorm. Start writing down anything under the category that occurs to you. Sometimes while writing down things you might come up with a new category, and sometimes while the category idea might have sounded good, you can't come up with more than three items.

   Our Sweetie and Rainbow K both watch a number of television shows, or are familiar with them. So I had two "Cartoon" categories for Our Sweetie, and I had a "Television," "Disney," and "Movie" category for Rainbow K. Our Sweetie had a "Famous Vampires" category. Rainbow K had a "Harry Potter" category all to her own.

   On the other hand, I was going to do "Cooking" as a theme for Our Sweetie, and couldn't come up with enough foods.

4. Don't worry about making it "too easy" or "too hard." Remember, the drawing that someone else does isn't necessarily going to look exactly like what the team guessing it is going to expect.

   My mother drew the "Hate: Saurkraut" from Our Sweetie's pile. She kept drawing something that ALMOST looked like a hot dog. For five minutes after her team failed to guess it, a handful of people went up to the board and tried to draw hot dogs in example. For "Cartoons II: Dexter's Laboratory" she tried drawing laboratory vials, beakers, and tubes. Let's just say that that also did not bring any points...

5. Once you have more than you need, weed them out by what you don't like, and most importantly, by the ones you can't figure out how to draw.

   How would you draw "Gwen Stefani" anyway?

6. Create the cards. I printed up on a $5 pack of cards from an office supply store the ones for Our Sweetie. For Rainbow K, I used index cards split into 4ths. On one side goes the category, the other the "clue."

7. Adapt your rule variations. Ours were as follows.
   
   
   
   • Roll a d10 (highest) for which team goes first. Teams can choose their own names.
     
   • Roll a d10 for category. Once all the cards in a category are exhausted, rolling that category number leaves it "Judge's Choice."
     
   • You get three seconds to look at the card and get a pen. You then get one minutes (90 seconds if under the age of 8) to draw. No letters, no numbers, no code words.
     
   • If your team does not have the correct guess at the end of the time limit, the other team gets one chance to "steal." "Stealing" does not change the order of turns, however.
     
   • Everyone who is playing has to have a turn at drawing. People without a clue (especially children) are allowed to get a clue from the Judge(s) on what to draw.
     
   • No complaints of, "I can't draw," are allowed.
     
   • Teams playing a 100-card game win at 10 points. Teams playing a 50-card game win at the end of all cards.
     
   • If there is a tie, you can have a challenge wherein the teams choose their best artist and they both get the same clue. The team that guesses the clue first wins the point.
     
   • Refer to the Judge(s) all disputes.
     
   
   

My birthday is in a few days, and I'm afraid my loves may just come up with this kind of idea for me... frankly, next year I think I might do, "Family Feud"-style games instead. [grin]