Telestrations Review – How To Go From Doughnuts to Pubic Hair

You’ve probably played Telestrations before. Probably not with the fancy notebooks and dry-erase markers, but with paper and pen. At least I know I did, back in the third grade.

You see, Telestrations is an implementation of the game Telephone – or Chinese Whispers if you’re Australian. You start with a prompt, like a simple word or phrase, and pass that prompt through a line of people. Until it reaches the end, and you realise the prompt you started with has distorted into something else entirely.

Only this time it’s drawing.

At the start of the game, everyone grabs a pen, pad, and a card with 6 different prompts. A die is then rolled, and the player refers to the card to receive their prompt for the round. They write this down in their notebook, and then (depending on player count) draw the prompt on the next page.

The book is then passed to the next player around the table, who looks at the prompt and gets 30 seconds to draw it. Afterwards, the book gets passed again. Only this time, the new player doesn’t get to see the original prompt – just the drawing. They need to guess the original prompt based on the drawing. Writing their guess on the pad.

This cycle repeats itself, with a new player given 30 seconds to draw the guess from the previous player. Continuing until the pad gets back to the original owner, who then looks through all of the pictures and guesses and thinks:

What the hell have I done?

A blast of miscommunication

Throughout the game, there will be times when you read someone’s guess and immediately know it’s not right. And that’s funny. But it’s nothing compared to when you get back your book and somehow it’s gone from doughnut to manhole to belly button to pubic hair.

What makes it such a blast is while there was a miscommunication, you can see the threads of what people were thinking. While originally, you might be thinking about how you go from a sweet treat to bodily fur, by the time you read the book you can pinpoint the exact time – and person – things go off the rails.

This. is. hilarious.

Because things don’t just go off the rails, they leave the rails in another country. Every miscommunication starts small but landslides into something unintelligible by the end. Making everyone around the table bust their guts laughing.

What makes Telestrations stand out from other party games like Just One, or Four Clover, is how consistently it delivers the laughs. I’ve been pulling Telestrations out for years now and not once has it failed to crack up every single person playing.

Drawing conclusions

Telestrations is a simple, yet amazing, party game. But some caveats could dampen your experience with the title. For instance, the laughter comes from everyone being earnest in their guesses and drawings. While it’s tempting to deliberately through the next person off, it cheapens the experience.

There are also a couple of dud words from the clue cards. When you get a prompt that’s too easy to draw and guess, it’s not fun at all. Especially, when the rest of the clues elicit such gleeful emotions. But these are few and far between.

There’s also a scoring system, but it’s often forgotten about. We rarely keep score. It doesn’t add anything to the game and gets in the way of the true fun of Telestrations. Revealing the mess that is your pad.

Otherwise, there’s not too much more to Telestrations. It’s a fantastic party game, and one I wished I’d played sooner. It’s easy on rules, a great social experience, and very little downtime no matter the size of the group. It’s also self-regulated, so it can be as dirty or clean as you want it to be. As such, Telestrations has edged out Monikers as the funniest game I’ve ever played.