Telephone Pictionary is a parlor game requiring only pen and paper to play. The game takes the concept of ‘Telephone’ (wherein participants sit in a circle and take turns whispering a phrase in one another’s ear, usually finding that the original phrase has become horribly corrupted in the process), and adds a visual component. Players alternate between written descriptions and drawings, going back and forth until the big reveal at the end.
Back in 2014, I developed a basic set of instructions to play Telephone Pictionary by snail-mail, available here. Feel free to adapt and refine these as you see fit.
I’ve lost track of how many games of Telephone Pictionary I’ve initiated via the US Postal Service. Some only took a month or two to finish; others were given up as lost before returning in the mail several years later!
Completed Games
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- Blackbeard’s Candyland (wherein the famous pirate’s temper turns into a pretext for bird crucifixion)
- There be whales here! (in which Star Trek IV On Ice turns into Willie Nelson singing the U.S. national anthem at a hockey game)
- Pickle Christmas (which regrettably turns into Pickle Good Friday)
- Tiny Dancer (ballerina… ballerina… ballerina… Tony Danza?)
- Secret Santa (which doesn’t go too far afield, really, though it does get a bit gory)
- Dance for your votes (in which we discover a more innocent time in our attempts to imagine political farce)
- Papal Bull (wherein imagining the pope as an action hero leads to flag-burning… and Abraham Lincoln… stealing a magic carpet?)
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John Appiah-Duffell 