A New Game

At our holiday get-togethers we often play board games. Balderdash is my favorite, though we play Cranium most often. Outburst and Taboo are a couple others we sometimes drag out of the closet.

This year we tried a new one. Telestrations is a game that tests your sketching and guessing prowess. Erasable sketch pads and cards containing words are passed out to players around a table. Each player is assigned a word to illustrate with a sketch. When finished they pass their pad containing the sketch to the player besides him or her who tries to guess the word from the sketch.

He writes his guess on a separate page in the pad, then the sketch pad is passed to the next player who flips to a new page in the pad and tries to sketch the word just written. When a player’s pad has made the rounds and is back into his original hands, then scores are tallied up. If you guessed a word right, you get a point.

Complicated maybe, but it was fun. Some of the words were easy to sketch. Bicycle made it all around the table without anyone guessing or sketching wrong. So did Michigan. Arm wrestling turned into thumb wrestling when one of the sketches appeared to feature the thumbs of the opponents.

Players learned quickly that it was better to sit by someone who could sketch. That was bad for me and those on either side of me. I’m a word man, not a picture man. I sketched what I thought was pretty clearly a “shipwreck” until wife Wendy next to me guessed my sketch to be “Mt. Kilimanjaro.”

What?? How could you possibly mistake the two? Can you see somebody out in the wilds of Africa suddenly exclaim, “Holy cow, a sailing ship just ran aground on the rocks there. No, wait. It’s Mt. Kilimanjaro. My bad.”

But that meant that my son Scott had to take Wendy’s guess of Mt. Kilimanjaro and now try to sketch that. He did a really good job sketching a mountain with wild animals roaming the plains below (all this in 60 seconds too). But my brother-in-law took a look at the sketch and guessed Mt. Fuji instead. I don’t think they have giraffes lurking in the foothills of Mt. Fuji in Japan.

Some of the original words can get twisted around pretty quickly. Like “identity theft", which when sketched became “doctorate” with the next guess after which I tried to sketch a black-robed graduate getting his diploma, so it then became “ebony and ivory” when my sister-in-law tried to guess what my sketch was. Then “ebony and ivory” became “ebony and ivory” again.

A correct guess! That's because my nephew had sketched a pretty good likeness of Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney at the piano. Now why can’t I draw like that?