Jun 222013
Telestrations the Telephone Game Sketched Out!
- 2,400 telestrations words on 200 Cards 6 words per side; 12 words per card
- 8 erasable telestrations sketch books
- 8 Erasable Markers
115443 Features: -Telestrations Party Game. -Telestrations is the hilarious new sketch, pass and guess party game . -Players simultaneously draw what they see and guess for uproarious laughter. -Unpredictable outcomes every time. -Includes: 8 erasable Felestrations’ sketch books, 8 erasable markers, 8 eraser pads. -2,400 Telestrations’ words on 200 cards, card box, 90 second plastic sand timer, die and instructions. -For 4 to 8 players. -Ages 12 to adult. Specifications: -Material: Plastic. -O
List Price: $ 29.99
Price: $ 22.90
Fun For The Family,
This game combines the best of Pictionery and the old game of Telephone. You pick a card that has various items listed on the card, i.e. dog, vacuum cleaner, ski slope etc. Each item is numbered, and everyone is given the item number they will have to draw on the first page of Telestration. The Telestration booklet is made up of 8 pages of a material that is easily erasable using the provided marker and cloth eraser. After doing your drawing you pass the booklet to the person to your right. On the page following your drawing, they have to write down what you have drawn; then they pass the book to the right and that person has to draw what you have written down. When the booklets have made the rounds of everyone in the game it’s time to reveal the sequence of words and drawings.
Laughter, guffaws, surprise, and enjoyment result from the reveal. We’ve had adults and children as young as 10 years old play in a round, and young and old enjoyed it equally. It’s a family game that can be enjoyed by adults. There’s a scoring system if you want to keep score, but we’ve enjoyed it with just sharing the results and disregarding the scoring process.
This would be ideal for a game to be played while recovering from the Thanksgiving Turkey, and it would be an excellent gift at Christmas time.
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|You’re better off doing it yourself!,
We’ve been playing our own version of this game for some time now, calling it “Telephone Pictionary”. The game itself is a fun family or party game but you don’t have to purchase this USAopoly version. The key sentence in the above game description is, “Gameplay requires little more than the included erasable markers and sketch books.” Truly, all you need to have a blast playing this game are index cards and pencils, which you can get separately. The game is addictive, so having extra drawing pads or index cards on hand will be helpful even if you choose to buy the boxed game. I am including rather detailed instructions for play so that anyone who wants to will be able to play without having to pay $20 just for instructions. If you just want a summary review – skip to the end!
First, how to play our version of the game and then how this boxed version differs from our do-it-yourself one. We play it like this – all players get a stack of index cards, 1 per player. Every player plays simultaneously. With each pass, you are either drawing an illustration or writing your interpretation of a drawing. To start, all players get a stack of index cards equal to the number of total players. The game begins with each player writing their own made-up sentence which has a noun, a place and a verb. For example, ‘Santa Claus rides a bike in the park’. Everyone passes their stack to the next player. When you receive the passed stack from your neighbor, you read his sentence then, in 2 minutes, illustrate it on the next index card.
The stack is passed again, with only the picture just drawn showing. This time, the next player writes the sentence that he thinks is depicted. This continues with players alternately drawing pictures or writing interpretations of the previous player’s drawing or sentence until the stack returns to the original writer.
Then the fun really begins! Each player reads through the stack of drawings and sentences, aloud and in the order written, showing the drawings to all. The unexpected turns the original sentence takes can be hilarious. The quick sketches and varied artistic abilities bring some strange results! Tracing the entire path is so fun. In the game Telephone, you can’t always trace back to where the twists came from; but in this game, you have a written trail. Given my sample sentence, it would not be unusual in this game for it to end up as, ‘Santa chased a hairy nun through a corn field’.
Note that the game Telestrations uses single words, not whole sentences as our homemade version. I think sentences make for more hilarity but it also requires a bit more thinking.
This is an enormously entertaining game, great for all ages and abilities to play together. Reading ability is a must; and patience, plus a little thick skin at times, are the only limitations. The more who play and the worse the drawings, the more fun. We usually play with 8-10 people but have played with as few as four, as many as 14. The latter turned out to be too long and cumbersome. Next time we have a group that large, we’ll split into 2 groups.
Bottom line – lots of fun, easy to learn and to play for all ages. But, in my opinion, absolutely not worth $20+ when you can DIY for pennies! What differences are you really paying for? A written set of instructions, a database of pre-selected words and a method for scoring, if you prefer competetive play. (For what it’s worth, even the most competetive in our family hugely enjoy this game without scoring.) I also think that much of the hilarity comes from using a complete sentence. Seeing Abe Lincoln riding in a rollercoaster beats the heck out of a soccer ball morphing into swiss cheese.
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|Great fun for 6, 7 or 8 people only,
QUICK SUMMARY: This game is a lot of good, clean fun and really delivers a lot of laughs. But it’ll only be really fun for 6, 7 or 8 people.
We played this game last night during our New Year’s Eve party. We had a houseful of people, and couldn’t break this game out until late in the evening, shortly before midnight, when the crowd thinned to just those families who were going to ring in the new year with us. That’s an important point, because this game only works well with 6, 7 or 8 people, I think. You can play with fewer, but the results won’t be as fun because the chances for the gameplay to go awry are fewer (going awry = funny outcomes). You can’t play with more than 8, as that’s the maximum number that the game is equipped to play.
What I LIKED:
- It leads to unpredictable, sometimes very hilarious outcomes, as people try to guess one another’s sketches.
- It kept everyone’s interest level up who were playing. In fact, we had too many people who wanted to play, so we swapped people in-and-out so more than 8 could experience game play.
- Once everyone got the hang of it, game play is pretty easy to do. It does take a strong game facilitator to LITERALLY make sure that “everyone is one the same page,” especially at the very beginning.
- Game length for an 8-person game was about right, that is, about 90 minutes. Long enough to really enjoy the game, not too long that it gets boring.
What I DON’T like:
- The game will only be really fun for 6, 7 or 8 dedicated players. Too few, and the outcomes aren’t as funny. The game limit is 8, and you really wouldn’t want to play with more than that, because it takes a while for each person to share his or her own sketchbook story at the end of a full round. It’s not a great party game for larger parties.
- Young kids can’t play it (well, anyway). The recommended age is 13+, as you need to have a fair amount of knowledge to recognize the words (like, “Cleopatra”), and to spell words that younger kids won’t know how to spell (even phonetically). I like that we didn’t have any words leading to R-rated (or worse) sketches.
- It can be challenging to make sure everyone knows what to do, whether they’re guessing a word or sketching a word. In three rounds of play with 8, we had one time where a sketchbook got screwed up because someone earlier didn’t erase one page of their sketchbook.
CONCLUSION: If you have the sweetspot of 6, 7 or 8 players who are 13+ years old, this game will deliver great results. It’s a good game to have in your arsenal of party games, but you won’t be able to pull it out at every event you host.
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