Now, recently we had some friends over for a gaming session, and the missus and I decided to break out a new one we hadn’t played before: Scrawl!
I’ll address the elephant in the room immediately: this game has a 4-player minimum. That kind of goes against my usual tagline here at Two Players Gaming, but exceptions must be made when you find a corker of a party game that needs to be shared with your nerdy circle!
Now, recently we had some friends over for a gaming session, and the missus and I decided to break out a new one we hadn’t played before: Scrawl!
I’ll address the elephant in the room immediately: this game has a 4-player minimum. That kind of goes against my usual tagline here at Two Players Gaming, but exceptions must be made when you find a corker of a party game that needs to be shared with your nerdy circle!
I’ll be honest—I read the instructions and didn’t have high hopes. I thought it sounded like a Pictionary knock-off, and while I don’t mind the classics, it's not exactly a game I look forward to unless we’re all a little too deep in the bevies to do anything else. I was wrong. So. Very. Wrong. The only thing this has in common with Pictionary is that you have to hold a pen.
The Round Breakdown
How it works is wonderfully chaotic: Everyone draws a card with four prompts. You might get something like:
· Bum Chin
· Costs an arm and a leg
· Laser Nipples
· Fear of Toilets
You pick one and draw it on a mini whiteboard. Then, everyone passes their drawing to the left. You look at the drawing you’ve just received, clip a blank card over it, and write down what you think it’s meant to be. Pass it on again. The next person reads that guess and has to draw that. This continues until your original board gets back to you, by which point it has usually mutated into something completely unrecognisable.
It’s like a cross between Chinese Whispers and Pictionary, and it is truly great. Let me describe the journey of one of my drawings:
I chose "Costs an arm and a leg." I drew a stick man at a sales counter with only one arm and one leg, handing over his spare limbs to a shopkeeper with a little pound sign above them. I passed it to my wife, who apparently thought my guy had entered some sort of black-market organ-harvesting shop. She wrote: "Hand and Foot Shop." She passed that to our friend, who then drew a shelf full of arms and legs with price tags on them. The last person looked at that and guessed: "Objects with price tags: Gloves, boots, boat?" By the time it got back to me, the idiom was well and truly dead.
A Note on the "Naughty" Stuff
While most of the cards are fairly innocent, some could definitely be aimed at a crowd with a more "colourful" sense of humour. During our game, the prompt for "Laser Nipples" eventually devolved into a rather detailed drawing of a nude torso—complete with more ahem detail than I was expecting to see! If you’re planning on playing this with the kids, you might want to sift through the deck first or ensure you temper your more liberal drawings for the audience.
Tips and Tricks
Usually, I follow a very specific structure in these reviews, but it's hard to give "pro tips" for a game about drawing badly. However, I’ll give it a go:
Embrace the Stick Man: Don’t overestimate your drawing abilities. I fall firmly into "stick man territory" and I’m proud of it. In fact, I’ll be sharing the "story" of my arm-and-leg masterpiece with this review so you can all bask in its incomparable glory.
Add a Splash of Colour: My missus is the crafty type, always designing things, so she dug out a box of fifty different coloured board markers (the game only comes with black). While it’s not strictly necessary, it certainly adds to the "story." For instance, when she drew "Laser Nipples," the red markers really helped... though that is one drawing I will not be sharing. I'm sure you understand.
Play for Laughs, Not Points: There is a scoring system where you give points for the best drawings and correct guesses, but honestly, this game is about the comedy, not the competition. Play it for the laughs.
