4th July 2005
Hi all,
Last week I had a really good evening out with some friends. We popped round to the house where one of my friends lived, enjoyed a meal, had several of the attendees discuss the problems they saw in the NHS (very interesting to an outsider) and then had a keenly contested game of Pictionary.
At this point I know that long-time friends of mine will be raising an eyebrow. Me, enjoying Pictionary? Well, I did, in spite of my history with the game, which is broken down as follows:
Technique: When I'm required to draw I'm not much use. I really should be better at it, given that I took Art for GCSE (which is a story for another time). However when it comes to Pictionary I draw something which usually looks nothing like the word or phrase I'm trying to draw, then point at it and make frustrated gestures and sounds towards the people trying to guess what it is. It isn't a particularly successful technique, and I'm probably not the only person who uses it.
Your guess is as good as mine: Instead of actually guessing what someone else is trying to draw stay mostly silent, breaking the sound of lead scratching paper with the odd "umm" and "err".
Living in a box: Neil Taylor gave Lorraine and I our own set of the game for Christmas either just before or just after we were married. It has never been out of the box (sorry, Neil).
So the fact of the matter is that on most occasions that I've played Pictionary I haven't enjoyed it. Needless to say when a friend of ours turned up that evening with a Pictionary box under their arm I wasn't looking forward to a game of it. In fact I was hoping that we would get distracted by other things and that the game would remain in the box.
However we did have a game (once the NHS employees felt they should change the subject, which I was quite enjoying if truth be told), and for some reason I quite enjoyed it. Here are some things I discovered about the game that night.
IT'S MORE FUN WHEN IT IS COMPETITIVE: I don't know whoever thought it would be a good idea, but the teams ended up being boys against girls. For some reason this upped the ante somewhat, especially once the girls asked to pass on the word "ballast" (on the basis that the drawer didn't know what ballast was). It goes without saying that this was brought up on several occasions by both teams.
IT'S MORE FUN WHEN THERE ARE ARGUMENTS: And there are plenty to be had. Who guessed an all-play first, whether a team actually said an answer or not, what square a team is on (which I didn't help with my casual dice rolling), etc. Of course to have arguments the game needs to be competitive, which is probably where games I've been involved with have gone wrong in the past. "Alright, we'll let you have that," was a phrase I didn't hear once on this night.
IT'S BETTER TO BE LUCKY THAN GOOD: On a couple of occasions I drew quite easy terms to draw (e.g. rabbit ears). However immediately following me my friend Jim drew a card and looked at it in a perplexed manner for a longer than usual period. After I did my usual, "Do you want me to look at the card to make sure it isn't an all-play?" joke, Jim confessed that he didn't have the first clue what the word meant or how to draw it. Drawing on the previous two points the word "ballast" came back into the conversation, before Jim decided he would have a go at drawing the word.
After a build up like that the word had to be a corker, and sure enough it was - Dachshund. How on earth are you meant to draw that? Even splitting the word into two would have been virtually impossible. Nightmare.
Following that the girls swept around the board pretty swiftly, prompting the more passionate members of the boys' team to ask for a rematch (which wasn't forthcoming). The girls' passage was assisted by, i) easy words, ii) good drawing, and iii) having twins in their team.
OPPOSING TWINS IS A BAD IDEA: On the girls' team that night were two friends of Lorraine's called Elaine and Karen. As you've no doubt already guessed they're twin sisters.
Now despite the fact that jokes were made about them not using ESP the fact is the two of them make a pretty awesome Pictionary double-act (yes, of everything they could be in life, I'm sure that's what they most wanted to achieve). One of them would start drawing and within a matter of seconds the other one would guess what it was. I can't remember any specific examples that seemed particularly difficult, but at times this was astonishing.
YOU'RE ONLY AS GOOD AS THE PEOPLE GUESSING FOR YOU: Here I had a big stroke of luck, as my friend Dale might be the best guesser I've ever played the game with. I don't think he feels the same about me though, given that I said, "House. Mansion. Bungalow. Shed!" when he was actually drawing a barn.
Familiarity is useful though, as I was recognising the same frustrated gestures from Dale that I've made myself many times in the past. Given the choice, I prefer using a keyboard to express myself.
Have a good week!
Tony
Main Archives
