Scribblish Review

Scribblish is a game very similar to the old gossip "Telephone" game I used to play as a child. In the "Telephone" game someone would think of a phrase and then whisper the phrase to one person and then the phrase was passed along until it rarely resembled the original whisperings.

The game basically works like this. Six players pick a card from the deck which has a phrase on it. Players then scribble quickly to draw a picture that matches the caption on their card. In this example, the phrase was, "I happen to own the world's biggest toaster." After the image is drawn, the original phrase is hidden and the card is handed to the next person.

 The person who receives the drawn image then writes down what they think the original phrase was. (This is not as easy as it sounds). In this example the first person wrote, "Giant blobs of black tar fall off my roof on me." This person then hides the image they viewed and passes the slip on to the next person. This process is repeated several times until all of the slots on the Scribblish card have been filled in.
 
You don't have to be Picasso to win this drawing game, as you can see from the drawings of my in-laws. Players can win by correctly guessing which final image comes from their original card, or by being voted as having the best drawing or caption. Because each picture or comment is done by a different person, each player has an even chance of figuring out which scroll is theirs. It amazed me at how far off a lot of our final phrases were from the original. We truly were asking ourselves, "How in the world, did this become that?"
 
As I was watching my in-laws play this game and I found it quite humorous that they ended up drawing snow falling off of a roof. There was no proding on my part to get the game to go this way. In fact, my in-laws did not know about Roof Things and the snow guards we sell when we played this round of Scribblish. Of course, they know about snow guards after this drawing came up. How you get from, "I happen to own the world's biggest toaster" to "All the snow of the roof fell on my head" is really quite a simple transition if you ask me. Not really, but hey, I felt it was a perfect chance for me to share a wonderful game on an otherwise irrelevant blog.
 
If you're looking for a good Christmas gift, New Year's party game, or just need something to do, I highly recommend this game for anyone. It really is a great family game and can be rather hilarious.