Pictionary is basically charades but instead of acting out the words you are drawing out clues using pictures. When you play Pictionary you should probably have at least some ability to get your point across by drawing because when you play Pictionary you draw and that is the main part of the game. To play Pictionary you can have as few as 4 people making up two teams of two players each or a huge party broken up into as many teams as you would like. That is what is great when you set up to play Pictionary, you can create whatever competition you want and pit the groups against each other however you want to. When you play Pictionary in a large group you could go as involved as to start a Pictionary tournament where the teams play Pictionary for prizes. It can be great fun but it can also be loud so be prepared to deal with a lot of noise if you decided to play Pictionary in a large group with several teams.

The idea behind Pictionary is simple. You need to have at least two teams of two players each to play a competitive game. Two people could play by trying to guess each other’s clues but that would not be a head to head competition. You can also take a large group of people and break them up into as many teams as you would like as long as each team has at least two players. Once you have broken up your group into teams you can begin by letting team one go first. Within each team there has to be someone designated to give clues for each round while the rest of the team tries to guess what the clues are. The clue giver selects a card from the deck on the playing board and then the team moves its play piece along the board until it stops at the designated number. At that point one of five categories will be on the space that the play piece has landed on. The play piece will land on a space that says person/place/animal, object, action, difficult, or all play. The drawer then looks at the card they drew from the deck and tries to draw clues on a large sheet of paper and the rest of the team has to guess what the drawer is trying to draw. If all play is selected then all the groups can play that round with the team that moved their player piece and whichever team guesses correctly first can steal the turn away from the drawing team. If the drawing team gets the guess right before time runs out then they would rotate to another drawer and that drawer would take a card from the deck and move the play piece again. Once the team either gets a guess wrong, or loses an all play, then the turn moves to the next team. The winning team is the team that gets their play piece to the end of the board first.

The beauty of Pictionary is that you can make up your own rules and if you are really creative you do not even need to use the game board. A version of Pictionary I have seen played has teams pitted against each other and the first team will start. The drawer of that team will select a card from the deck and someone from the team that would be playing next would choose the category. Obviously the all play feature would not be used in a game set up like this. The team whose turn it is would then try and guess what their drawer is drawing before time runs out. If they guess they get one point, if they do not guess they get no points. Once that team’s turn is over the turn then goes to the next team and this goes on for a pre-determined number of rounds usually 10. At the end of the last round the team with the most points wins. If there is a tie then sudden death rounds are played until there is a winner. This seems to be a better way to play Pictionary at parties and is loosely based on the television game show Pictionary that was on a few years ago. Either way a great time can be had by all when you play Pictionary.