Chaos Pictionary: how to play by Cousins House Rules
Why wait while the other team draws, when everyone could be drawing at once, all the time? (!)
Regular Pictionary is kinda boring when it’s not your team’s turn to draw, so when I was growing up, our family invented Cousins1 house rules Pictionary. The basic concept: All teams draw at the same time, every round.
Nobody gets bored, waiting while the other team is drawing…because at all times you are either drawing or guessing! An excellent game for big gatherings with friends and/or family. Play a few rounds after a meal!
Chaos Pictionary (Cousins House Rules)
What you need:
You only need the deck of cards from the box. (You don’t need the gameboard, the dice, the tokens, the timer.) (See notes later on ideas for how to play if you don’t have Pictionary handy.)
You need at least 4 people. Split into teams of 2-3 people, or more if you want.
You’ll need some sheets of paper, and one pencil or pen per team.
How to play:
Arrange yourselves in some way that people have a flat surface to draw on, and everyone on a team can see what’s being drawn. Around a table works best, but this is living room friendly if you get creative with flat surfaces to draw on.
Pull a stack of cards out of the box, and make a pile in the center to choose from.
Start by someone picking a card, and choosing the word to draw (from the options on the card). It doesn’t matter who picks, the first round. Once someone chooses the word, they announce the letter/color to everyone at the table, and pass the card (keeping it hidden from the guessers) to the “drawer(s)” on other team(s) for that round.
Once all the drawing people have seen the word, put the card face down in a discard pile, and someone says “Go!” — each team’s drawer starts drawing and everyone else starts guessing.
All teams draw the same word, at the same time. Everyone else watches their team’s drawing person, and says their guesses out loud. The team that guesses the word first wins the round.
If you’re the next person to draw on the team that just won the round, pull a new card, and pick the word for the next round of drawing. This is fun, because you can be strategic and try to pick a word you think will be easiest for your team to guess, or easiest for you to draw, or you can pick what you think will result in the funniest or hardest round.
There’s no timer, just go until one team guesses the word. If everyone is stumped and there’s general agreement that further drawing is fruitless, then nobody won that round. (The person who picked the word draws a new card and picks again.)
We usually play until the group feels like stopping, but you could pick a set number of rounds or a set time, e.g. “let’s play for half an hour”…
If you’re competitive and need more reward for winning a round than your team getting to pick the next word to draw, you can of course keep score with tallies.
Extra gameplay notes
At the beginning, go over the Categories on the cards with all the players. Knowing the category of the word you’re guessing can be a helpful hint if you’re in category P (Person, place animal), O (Object), or A (Action). For Difficult and All Play (the only time in regular pictionary rules where all teams get to draw at once), who knows…
Decide amongst yourselves what counts as correct. For example, if the word is “golfing” and someone says “golf”, you have to keep drawing until they guess “golfing”… Generally it needs to be exact, but maybe if you have younger people playing, and you make different rules.
As in regular Pictionary: NO letters/symbols, writing allowed. You can draw two lines if what you’re drawing is two words.
It’s not cheating to sneak a peek at other team’s drawings. (Unless you decide your house rules don’t allow that.)
Draw on the same sheet, until the page feels “too full” to draw more - then flip it over and draw on the back. So you could incorporate your past drawings and circle them or add onto them. No going back to previous pages though. Just your current sheet. Paper can be whatever size you have handy.
If you have younger players, make sure there’s agreement that the words chosen are ones that the kids can read and/or will know what they are. (The official game says it’s for ages 8+, for reference. But very young players who don’t totally know how to read yet can be included if they love to draw — they might need the word whispered to them or explained by the drawer from a different team — just quickly sneak off into a different room to help them if needed before their turn to draw. Spread out the youngest players onto different teams and maybe have the youngest ones all be “drawers” at the same time so they’re not competing to draw quickly against an adult.
If a card you draw has only boring words and none of them would be fun for the group to draw, declare “too boring!” and put it in the discard pile, and draw a new card. Don’t use this to your advantage though — only for the purposes of fun.
How to play if you don’t have Pictionary
First of all, if you don’t have Pictionary at home, may I recommend aiming for a vintage deck because the cards from the 80s are the best in terms of design, and they can $2-4 at a thrift store. (You might have to be patient and go a few times, but I promise, vintage Pictionary is abundantly available. It’s the navy/dark blue box with white borders, like in my photos above. Searching “Vintage 1985 Pictionary” will give you more photos.) If you like playing by these rules you can go ahead and get rid of everything but the little box of cards so it doesn’t take up much space.
Don’t have Pictionary handy and want to play, today or this weekend? Some ideas:
Ask your neighbors/family/anyone who is coming over if they have Pictionary you can borrow.
Give everyone a bunch of slips of paper and let people write words, put them in a bowl, and draw words from that.
Search “pictionary word generator” online and there are a number of free apps/websites that could work, maybe like this one? (But involving electronics is of course less fun than drawing cards, I highly recommend aiming to thrift a vintage pictionary deck at some point.)
After the game, people might want to take home their favorite drawings to put up on the fridge for a little bit. Our latest fridge decor was “monsters” by Adam… Many monsters, because everyone was stumped for a while. Wow what a masterpiece. I cannot believe I didn’t guess it.
I really love pictionary because it is so fun to draw, and to see what everyone else draws. It’s just so fun to be challenged to draw fast and think of inventive ways to communicate the essence of something, to get out of your head about what drawing is or trying to make a “good” drawing and into just ~~~playing~~~ and working as a team and being silly. Anyways, highly recommend Pictionary with the Cousins House Rules.
Have fun! And if you play this weekend, and any amazing drawings occur, feel free to reply to this email and share them so I can get a kick out of them too.
—Amelia
P.S. — Do you play any drawing games? I’ve collecting descriptions of drawing games for the last few years — like Sentence-Picture, Exquisite Corpse, Draw-in-the-Dark! I would love to hear about yours. (Just write back and tell me about it, and if I put it in the zine I plan to make someday, I’ll send you a copy.)
P.P.S. — If you’re looking for another fun-chaos group game to play, there’s multi-player Solitaire where everyone plays their aces into the middle and from there, anyone else can play on them. So it’s a bit of a race to get all your cards out into the center, and not always possible, sometimes the game ends when everyone is stuck. You need a big enough table, and you need to have a different color/design deck for each person who wants to play, so you can re-sort the decks back to each player between rounds. (Thrift stores are great for this — lots of variety, and the cards are already worn in and easy to handle. Just count the deck before you buy it, to make sure they’re all there.)
You can play with two people, three people. Four to six is exciting and fast moving. We’ve gotten up to 12 people at once. I’ll never forget the family gatherings around my grandma’s extendable oval table, laughing so much, but that sometimes got very wild, since people further out have to stand and almost leap to reach to play their cards. (Also, watch out for your competitive family members with this game. Blood has been drawn, accidentally, but still! One of my uncles always cheated. My mom, sister and a cousin have been battling for the crown of multi-sol dominance for two decades.)
Gameplay goes until someone goes out, or everyone is stuck. First person to go out, or end with the least cards, wins the round. If you want to keep track of a total for the night, count the number of cards each person has left after each round - lowest number wins, or first to a number loses and ends the session. I’m not great at this game but really love it.
P.P.P.S. — Thank you so much for the enthusiastic response to the Layout Department news yesterday! And for everyone who wrote back to us, we’ll get back to you soon. :) What if someone used the Layout Department to make a little mini-zine of drawings from chaos pictionary! Now I want to do that this weekend………
I’m Amelia Cousins Greenhall since Adam and I got married, but this is solidly COUSINS House Rules Pictionary. Important legacy!