Backseat Drawing
Out of the Box Publishing excels at quite a few things. Coming up with new ideas for games is one of them, to be sure, but another is adding their own spin to older ideas. Like mechanics fussing about with an automobile they feel can benefit from just one more little tweak, they take a concept and pull on it like a Stretch Armstrong doll. The company’s game developers add twists that in retrospect seem obvious, but that kind of thinking is how they earn their name. The result of their good-natured mangling: Backseat Drawing, a game of artistic interpretation.
The players split into two teams, and a Director from each side looks at the word for the round. The word has to be illustrated on one of the small included whiteboards, but that person doesn’t draw it – he instructs this round’s Artist how to draw it using indirect hints. Teams score points for guessing the right answer, and whichever team reaches a predetermined total first wins. They’ve even released a version for kids and family that goes the extra mile to further encourage group play. While perhaps not the company’s most innovative offering, the team at OTB (represented here by creators Peggy Brown and Catherine Rondeau) knows how to get mileage out of a good thing. Even if it starts off derivative, this added layer drives players to amusing distraction; they try to connect the dots as someone doodles at a remove. The urgency and frustration make a delicious and potent combination.
The box comes with a pair of erasable whiteboards (with erasers), four dry-erase markers, and a deck of 168 double-sided cards in a viewer (a plastic frame that displays one card at a time). On one side is a set of easy items to draw, while the words on the opposite face are a little bit tougher; everyone agrees which side to use. The Director from each team looks at the word on the next card and, when the round starts, they give broad instructions to their respective Artist. If the word was “gun,” it might sound something like, “Draw a horizontal rectangle. Make it long but thin. Now add another rectangle, attached to the underside of the first one, but this one should be vertical and a bit thicker…”
As the thing is being drawn (and erased, and redrawn, and…), the teammates guess what’s being depicted (the artist can call things out as well, if he doesn’t think the multitasking will result in heart failure). The team that figures out the answer first wins a point. Roles then rotate, a new Director and Artist are selected, and the next card in line sets everyone’s adrenaline off again. The number of points needed to win can be raised or lowered to adjust the length, but a game typically lasts 20 to 30 minutes.
Games like this are invariably met with the same criticism when people are approached to take part: “I can’t draw.” Fortunately such wan excuses are now done away with since the person doesn’t need to know how to draw, just how to follow directions. That doesn’t mean there won’t be bitter recriminations or a period at the end of each round where several players look back and forth from the “artwork” to the Director and back again, shaking their heads sadly and demanding to know just how that’s supposed to look like lettuce. Such situations still come up.
The simple and hard sides cater to how much hand-holding the participants want – easy words (according to the creators, anyway) are things like gun, cow, and beard. Helmet, popcorn, and the Big Dipper are examples of the tougher side, but then the same creative team also put “office building” on the easy side, so use that as a benchmark to keep it all in perspective. Another plus: Not only are the rules provided in English, French, Spanish, and German, so are the words on the cards. Want a fun way to introduce students to the building blocks of other languages? It’s such a forthright method, it’s almost embarrassing not to see more of it in the marketplace.
From a description such as this one might wonder exactly how one creates a “junior” version of an already elementary pastime – but they did it. In the family edition, there’s still an easy and hard side to each card (the harder side is called “Super Challenge”), but this time instead of just providing a word, there’s a cartoonish picture as well just to spark the imagination and give an idea of how to go about describing what’s needed. (Which means someone overseeing John Kovalic’s graphic design work on this product had to tell him, “Make your drawings simpler.”) Shoes and tables are the easy items; these give way to comets and beavers. The boards have a point track already printed on them. The rules also make several concessions to younger family members, like encouraging everyone to accept certain synonyms (if the word was automobile, for example, car should suffice – not something they let you get away with in the “adult” version). It should also be noted what isn’t here: the multiple languages aren’t used, in the rules or the pieces.
A check of the components is usually more than necessary when evaluating games, but in this case it’s hard to find a fault with them. Whiteboards and their applications are familiar to everyone these days, so those and their accompaniments (pens and erasers) pretty much make up the whole shebang. The cards (and the drawing boards) are sturdy, and one wishes more games were like that (well, not precisely like that – these aren’t meant to be shuffled like some – but decent card stock is a priceless commodity in the hobby these days). The supply should last a while, longer if anyone’s prepping for Europe, but even so, supplements of new cards seem like they’d be inexpensive and welcome. The “window” for the cards is a plain but effective plastic box that holds the cards firmly, not tightly, so switching them out is easy while spilling them is not. It rings up at $24.99, $19.99 for the junior game.
The regular game lists four to eight players, the junior version three to eight. With an “all-in” form of the junior game, there are no teams. Everyone guesses at a single Director’s one picture, and if someone gets it, both he and the Director get a point apiece. The numbers aren’t hard and fast, but the issue is how many people can reasonably crowd around the picture boards or make themselves heard.
Since both teams are lost in their own fevered world once the round starts, it may on occasion be hard to tell who got the word first if it’s close (there’s no provision for a judge who listens for a winner), but the one part of the yelling and screaming that’s hard to miss is the other team crowing about their success the instant it happens, so the issue seldom comes up. At the same time that should give a good impression of what this game does to people – Backseat Drawing charges their batteries, tests the Directors’ imagination and clarity of thought, and (literally) keeps players on the edge of their seat.