"Hey, Bigfoot is in my backyard!" (?)
Scribblish is a telephone-style party game where players illustrate captions and caption illustrations. The difficulty and silliness arises from trading papers so that each player illustrates someone else’s caption and captions someone else’s illustration. After a few rounds the point-scoring phase consists of trying to guess which illustration originated with your original caption.
Basic stats
| Name | ScribblishBGGeek/GDad |
|---|---|
| Number of players | 4-6 according to box; more the better if you can improvise the scrolls |
| Age | 8+ |
| Playing time | 10 minutes per round; we played for hours |
Player reviews
- Jack
- This was a lot of fun, and very well paced. We’d played some drawing games before, and so had developed a bit of a style of drawing. However, there were several rounds I simply could not guess which picture was my illustration, and one round where early on I had gotten “my” caption back, and so was certain I was going to win. I drew based on the current and my original caption, and lo and behold at the end were
two
- pictures resembling my caption. The game was very fun and very silly. The timer was unnecessarily complicated, and the scrolls took getting used to, but overall it was well designed. Like most party games, we found keeping score to be pointless, and the point-scoring phase became simply an excuse to show off the degeneration/evolution of the captions.
This was a fun game, and worked much better than I thought it would; that is, some of the end results were very silly, and bore little resemblance to the originals! Since the paper passing is simple (a die roll determines whether your paper moves one to the left, two to the right, randomly, etc.) I thought it would be too easy to keep track of where your paper had gone, but I quickly forgot about trying to do so, concentrating on coming up with a new caption or illustration in the short time allowed.
House rules and expansions
More than six players? Better show and tell?
Other versions and reviews
Geekdad?