Pictwits! is a great party game. Easy to learn (especially if you have ever played any humor game like Apples to Apples) and virtually inexhaustible. The game consists of over 500 pictures and 144 captions. One player, the judge, reveals a caption, the rest submit a picture. The judge decides which picture is best.
You can keep score if you want. You can try to win by having your pictures chosen most often. You can try to get to know something about your fellows. But most importantly you try to be the funny one. Laughter is the best measure of success. In the end, no one will care who won. They might remember individual jokes, but they’re more likely to just walk away with a pleasant ache in their funny-bones and the buzz of a good party.
The designers suggest having a countdown from 5 to help speed things along. We did it and had some laughs as folks scrambled to slap a card down. But it was hardly crucial. Another layer of joy for a Major Fun game.
Last year I was introduced to Cards Against Humanity. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this game , think Apples to Apples for the eighteen and over set. If there was a category in Major Fun for “Adult Games” this would certainly be a Keeper. It’s not that the language of the cards is particularly crude (although some are) it’s that the responses are so highly suggestive. Cards Against Humanity drives home one of my central beliefs that humor is inappropriate. ALL humor is inappropriate. Humor is a way humans cope with situations in which some rule or expectation is violated. Even simple Knock-Knock jokes demonstrate this.
Pictwits! is a great way for people to say inappropriate, outlandish, transgressive things and then bask in the resulting rush of endorphins and neurotransmitters like dopamine. The game sits somewhere between Apples to Apples (Why did the chicken cross the road?) and Cards Against Humanity (There once was a man from Nantucket…) so you can generally feel good about opening it up at your next family game night. The pictures and captions in Pictwits! can be enjoyed a by a wide range of ages. There’s plenty of room for snark and double-entendre among an adult crowd, and outright silliness for younger kids.
It’s also good to see this game mechanic applied to visual answers. Picking out funny photographs? Major Fun.
For 4+ players, ages 10+
Pictwits! was designed by Nicholas Cravotta and © 2012 by MindWare.