Saturday!

Okay. So you’ve got a group of people sitting together and they all want to play a game but you know better than to play monopoly and your easel broke the last time you attempted Pictionary.

Well, if everybody has a smartphone, I’d like to recommend Drawful 2, from the You Don’t Know Jack people.

The conceit is simple: Each person in the room has their own smartphone (smartphones not included) connected to a unique room in the Jack universe (if you’ve ever made a conference call at work, it’s kinda like that). The game goes to the first player and, on their cell phone, gives them 30 seconds to draw something with a fairly complex concept. “Existential Horror”, say. The first player then gets to draw this on their cellphone. Then the little sketch is shown to everybody in the room on the main monitor (the computer monitor if you’re playing on PC or the television if you’re playing on a console). Everyone is asked to guess what the person was asked to draw. They have 30 seconds to type it in. Then all of the guesses are put up on the screen and everyone is supposed to guess what the original concept really was and the pool of options consists of the real answer plus the guesses that everybody made.

If one of the other players guesses your guess, you get X points. If one of the other players guesses the real concept? They get X points and the artist gets 2X points.

Then, after the answers have been given, people vote on their favorite of the guesses. (No points for this, but some kudos.)

Then the game moves on to the second player and then the third and so on until everyone has gotten a turn to be the artist. The points are tallied up and the winner is declared and then everybody yells “I want to play again!”

Steam has it on sale for 50% off right now. If you’ve ever been thinking “I need a party game for some of my more normie friends”, this is the party game for you.

So… what are you playing?

(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]