Critical Play: Comparative Analysis – Jonathan

Introduction & Big Questions

I took a look at the game Telestrations, published by Asmodee. We played a digital version by Tanner Krewson on rocketcrab.com, which had the additional features of undo/redo, choosing your pen size, and choosing your pen color among 4 colors (black, green, red, blue). The game is clearly inspired by the children’s game Telephone (the one where you whisper a word from one end to the other); in analyzing this game in relation to our P1, I’m especially curious about the following questions:

What does Telestrations change about its inspiration (Telephone)? Why?
How does Telestrations keep the game fresh, if at all?
What kinds of fun does Telestrations support? How did they create that kind of fun?
What are the key (especially unexpected!) dynamics that emerge when playing?
How does Telestrations deal with boredom? How does it keep waiting players interested?
- How could I improve this?
What does Telestrations do to facilitate its rules/keep it fun “even while drunk?” Are the rules just that simple, or is there more?
Were there any points where Telestrations broke down? If so, why?
How would I make it better?

In particular: Our P1 game is also a drawing game inspired by Telephone (and in fact inspired by Telestrations directly), so I want to understand what makes Telestrations fun and see what is transferrable to ours, what isn’t, and how we might push the mechanics farther or to be even more different in accordance with our Mafia theme and mechanics. When we playtested last Tuesday, there were some concerns brought up about (1) bounding the player creativity so a correct guess is possible (e.g. pick a well-known category), and (2) about the players waiting in line (as the drawing/guessing travelled from one side to another). What can we learn from Telestrations?

Formal Elements & Types of Fun

Objective: Telestrations uses primarily player-led objectives! Ostensibly you want to correctly communicate an idea through drawing, guessing, writing, and drawing some more, but when players play it’s much more about the fun of seeing what happens and how things mess up (and laughter!)
Players: This game is cooperative, perhaps more “player vs. human limitation” rather than “player vs. game”
Boundaries: The magic circle of the game (the table, drawing pads, and players) gives players permission to draw and guess things they might not normally, and draw despite a perceived lack of talent.
Resources: Telestrations includes these really genius notepads that serve three purposes; they (1) allow players to draw and re-draw their prompts (whiteboards!), and (2) they instruct players on what to do with each round (prompts them with what they’re doing this round– drawing, or guessing), and (3) functions to hide players’ drawings-in-progress and guesses-in-progress from each other.
Procedures: Players draw prompts from cards, sometimes filling in blanks or their own prompts instead (as instructed by the drawn cards). Then, they draw that, pass it along to the next player, who guesses it; that guess becomes the prompt to the next person, etc. Bonuses are optionally awarded at the end.
Rules: Aside from the general gameplay flow, there aren’t a lot of concrete rules– just that (to preserve the fun), players shouldn’t draw words or numbers.
Outcomes: Telestrations has a particularly interesting situation with its outcomes– the players can choose the desired type of outcome (which influences the kind of fun that players are going for). They can either go for a more cooperative-competitive blend where players get bonuses for completing certain tasks the best, or successfully bringing a prompt all the way around. Otherwise, players can play “just for fun,” without points.

The primary type of fun the designers of Telestrations were going for is quite clearly fellowship, as the fun of the game is found primarily in watching people do bad or unintelligible drawings and trying to find their interpretation, then laughing with each other on it. I could also see the game being categorized under expression (as drawing is a way to self-express!), and challenge (how can you communicate complex or symbolic ideas visually?!). I bet sketchnoters would be really good at Telestrations!

Visual Design

The design of the game emphasizes the “sketchy” and fun vibe, using spiral bound sketchbooks, big bubbly bold fonts, and calling the two sides of its cards “this” side and “that” side; the main title uses a font that jiggles around, and much of the fonts used elsewhere are (again) bubbly and bold. This emphasizes the theme and the fun-focus of the game.

Exploring the questions above

What does Telestrations change about its inspiration (Telephone)? Why? (+How does Telestrations deal with boredom? How does it keep waiting players interested?)
- Telestrations changes and fixes a few issues with the original Telephone. In particular, it fixes the waiting problem: in Telephone, players at the end of the line have to wait for players down the line. In Telestrations, there are effectively N (= number of players) parallel Telestrations happening at once, every round, and the use of the pad keeps players from getting lost in the sauce (the pads also have the name of the original player on them). This also means that there are N times the hilarity at the end!
How does Telestrations keep the game fresh, if at all?
- It has a large deck of cards, each of which are double sided (with an easy and hard side), many of which set a theme but allow you to fill in a blank (so you have theoretically infinite options); each side also has 6 options you roll a dice to decide between! This strikes a nice balance between player openness and creativity while still asking players to go outside their comfort zone and go into the truly absurd!
What are the key (especially unexpected!) dynamics that emerge when playing?
- One interesting thing that started happening is a couple players were identified as really bad or really good, which caused them to be more challenging to be sat next to, and or really good, in which case the other players would sometimes ask them to impose extra restrictionsto keep the game from getting potentially boring when going through their turn.
What does Telestrations do to facilitate its rules/keep it fun “even while drunk?” Are the rules just that simple, or is there more?
- The sketchbooks do this by keeping the rules right in front of you the whole time!
Were there any points where Telestrations broke down? If so, why?
- As mentioned above, sometimes the player would impose some extra rules to keep the game more fresh when players got (or were) too good.
How would I make it better?
- I think that a really fun extension could be to have “challenges” (potentially for points) also passed out. This can also be a balance mechanism– perhaps the players who are voted best drawing are the ones who get the challenges next round!