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Where Our Story Begins
Telestrations has been around for a while, it is a drawing version of the telephone game. Picture the scene, you have gathered a group of family or friends together for dinner. You ate way too much garlic bread and lasagne, because it was so delicious, but you have an amazing dessert planned. So you decide to play a game whilst you digest and create an appetite for that first rate crumble. Enter the perfect solution to your quandary, Telestrations is a fun, easy to access game.
Gameplay
The aim of the game is to have an absolute blast. This is a game of drawing, most likely badly, and against a timer and then trying to guess your pals’ silly pictures. At the start everyone is given a flip-pad and a dry erase marker and draws a card. Collectively you decide to be on “this” or “that” side and roll the dice. Each player must write the word on their card matching the value on the die. Next you must flip to the next page in your pad and begin drawing. You have a timer to keep the pressure on though.
Whilst one of you is trying your best to draw the death penalty, another might be drawing the royal family, or a rollercoaster park. Every drawing must be done within the timer so you'll not be doing your best artwork, and the chunky pens make it hard to give much detail to your piece. I find that the timer is long enough for you to try to add a bit too much complexity to your drawing. Sometimes less is more!
Once the timer is up you pass the book to your left and that player tries to decipher your squiggles and writes down their guess. You do the same for the incoming book to you. Then the books pass again and another round of drawing happens but this time of the guesses! Like the telephone game these could be bang on or wildly wrong. You'll only find out in the big reveal!
We did the reveal like a storytime where you said “hello my name is Hannah”, everyone responded with “Hi Hannah”, and then I continued with “my word was ‘shooting target’, which I drew like this. Unfortunately though, Michael did not understand my excellent drawing and he thought that I meant archery. Johnathan ran with that and drew something utterly not anything like archery, which is shown by Chris’s guess where she thought it was a sausage.” Cue the belly laughs.
Components
The components here in Telestrations need to be pretty sturdy and luckily they are. Each player has a chunky black dry erase marker with which to draw their Picasso and write their guesses down. The flip books all have different coloured spirals so at a quick glance you can spot your book going around the table.
The main thing that brings the fun here is what is written on the cards, and I think the best descriptor is off-the-wall random. On the same card you will have needlepoint, the royal family, rotten apple, burrito, salmon and bullet proof vest. Quite honestly the drawing is only a tenth of the fun, the fun comes from the reveal, and the more random the ask, the better the reveal in my opinion.
Replayability
I loathe to say anything has infinite replayability, but it might be justified here. There are so many double sided cards here each with six things on each side. Each game you might personally get through four or five cards, and that could easily be an hour’s fun. Each different set of people you play with will bring something completely different to the table too.
Round Up
If you are looking for a laugh with friends and family and you want something easy that you can play with anyone then why not pick up Telestrations. It pretty much guarantees a laugh unless you are drawing with actual artists, and even then I’m not sure how well they could draw a cowboy in 30 seconds…
