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Thursday, September 29, 2011

Title of Blog (with guest artwork!)

Apparently, about 94.33333333% of the people on this planet (data needed) have never played Pictionary Telephone—the amazingly fun game that this blog is named after. This is very sad, as it means that about 94.33333333% of homo sapiens sapiens lead empty, joyless lives. (And you call yourselves “wise wise man”. Hah.) If you're one of that very sad population, however, there's hope! This post will teach you how to play Pictionary Telephone.

If you were an elementary school student at any point in time, you know the game Telephone. One person chooses a random phrase like "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" and whispers it to the person next to them. Then that person turns to Person #3 and whispers whatever they heard the first person say. By the time it gets around your whole reading circle/lunch table/detention room, the phrase has mutated into the alliterative "I love the smell of sweaty socks" or something completely irrelevant to what the first person said.

That's how Pictionary Telephone works, only with paper and pictures also. You need an odd number of people—the more, the better. Sometimes your phrases hardly change at all (especially if you write highly drawable ones, like “Kittens!”) or sometimes they change a lot (especially if you write something ridiculously existentialist like “I reject your reality and substitute my own”), leading to disaster and hilarity. Everyone needs a stack of small papers; there should be one paper for each person in every stack. So if you're playing with eleven people, each person needs a stack of eleven papers. The other rule is that when you draw things, you can’t use letters or numbers. Note: it really helps if you number your papers. If you don't, there's almost a guarantee that someone will drop the stack and then you will be sad and confused.

On Paper 1, everyone needs to write a phrase. So to start off a recent game, for example, I wrote "All the raindrops are lemon drops and gumdrops", which is from this adorable song that I performed a jazz dance to when I was four.

Then I passed the stack to my roommate Summer, who read Paper 1, placed it at the back of the stack, and on Paper 2 illustrated what I'd written:


Those are either gumdrops, or it’s snowing lumps of coral. Either way, pretty damn impressive.


Summer then passed the whole stack to Levi, who tried to figure out what she meant by that insanely talented drawing. He wrote “Catching snowflakes on my tongue”, which is a reasonable interpretation if you don’t know what snowflakes look like. I’ll give him credit though, since he’s from Southern Virginia and there’s only snow down here when Snow Meiser takes over Heat Meiser’s territory (citation needed).

Note: If you’re following along correctly, you probably noticed that you’re writing on the odd-numbered papers and drawing on the even-numbered ones. Yep, that’s how it works. The goal is to end on a phrase, which is why you need an odd number of people to play.

Levi passed the message along to Svetlana, who drew an incredibly detailed and amazing representation of this.


The definition of art.

Theo received the paper and did a less-than-stellar job of figuring out what Svetlana’s epic drawing meant. On Paper 5, he wrote, “Sky asterisks fall upon my tongue.”

…what?!

I’m not saying that Svetlana is Michaelangelo or something, but what the hell are sky asterisks? (According to googleimages, this is a sky asterisk. It also does not look even close to what Svetlana drew.)

Either way, Morgan, who got the papers next, did her very best with what Theo gave her.


Looks like snow to me.

I can only assume that La-a (that's pronounced la-dash-a) was trying very hard to figure out what Morgain meant by this, but I think something was lost in translation, because she wrote “He saw stars before he passed out.” This moved along to Shandy, who was probably wondering what the hell someone wrote down to get the phrases to this point.


Lovely.

Original message aside, I’ve got to say that Shandy’s drawing of this wasn’t bad. And HAL (our resident sassy-but-possibly-straight robot) correctly interpreted this to mean “Drunk people pass out.”

And that, my readers, is how you play Pictionary Telephone, and how you get from a Barney song to alcoholics.

Maybe you didn’t have that far to go.

[Disclaimer: I don't own the last picture, but the website I found it on said it was from the public domain. So please don't sue me. I'm just someone who tries really hard to be funny.]

2 comments:

  1. Sounds like a lot of fun. Gonna have to try it next time I'm in an "odd" group of people.

    ReplyDelete