Sketch. Act. Guess!

I haven’t seen the movie yet, but reviews assure me she’s radiant even when eating a pizza. Being impressionable and easily swayed, she’s influenced the headline of my piece on Pic Charades from Leo Mattel. I dust away the cobwebs from a long ignored box, lying right on top of an exposed and neglected shelf. The sand timer is missing, as are pencils, drawing pad and the rules leaflet. No matter. One look at the deck of cards, and three die, and you instinctively know what to do!

Dice 1 selects one of three alphabets from ‘A’ through ‘C’, Dice 2 selects a number from 1 through 6. Dice 3 selects ‘act’ or ‘sketch’. Pick a card, roll all three die, and you know which word or phrase you’ve got to clue your team. I picked WHALE and had to act it out. Easier said than acted, as it turned out. I splashed a giant fin to no avail. I mimicked the Free Willie jump, and hands uplifted saw the whale soar over me into the freedom of the sea beyond. My team yelled ‘sixer’, clearly influenced by the current cricket excitement. I opened my jaws wide, ate Jonah, then cut to him living inside my stomach, and finally coughed him out. In hindsight it was understandable they didn’t get it at all!
Pictionary is such a wonderful entertainer. It’s fun to play in its pure sketch-and-guess mode. It’s even better in combination with dumb charades. Spear’s Games wisely ignores the temptation to throw in an entirely irrelevant game board to move around each time your team guess right. The focus is on the words and phrases, cluing and guessing. Nothing else!
Once in love with the format, you’ll appreciate you don’t really need cards at all. Come up with your own words and phrases. Playing with movie names is a riot. More so when in sketch mode. When acting movie titles, players who try to re-create a scene of the movie, tend to go nowhere at all, much like the elaborate artists who lose time finishing masterpieces, when a telling squiggle would have done just as well!

— The author may be contacted at arup_kavan@yahoo.com [1]