Photo showing us having a family game of Pictionary Family Edition  at Christmas.

Mattel kindly sent me and my family a couple of board games to review over Christmas. (I am so sorry Mattel for the delay in writing up the reviews of the games.)  I have just written up the review for Scrabble Trickster (which we love!) and you can read that here.


Photo of Pictionary Family Edition by Mattel

The other game that was sent to us was the new Family Edition of Pictionary which was released to celebrate 25 years of Pictionary. This edition is different from Classic Pictionary as it comes with two sets of cards. One set is for kids to draw from and the other set is for adults to draw from.  I loved the fact that you get separate sets of cards for the little ones and the big kids adults as it means the whole family can truly play the game together. I feel the new edition of the Pictionary is successful in it’s aim to get kids and adults to play together side by side. Everyone enjoyed the game when we played it over the Christmas break and now Easter is coming up we will be playing it again. As I mentioned in my review of Scrabble Trickster, board games always remind me of happy childhood memories of family holidays in our tourer caravan as we would always go away for School Holidays – be it Christmas, Easter or the 6 weeks holiday.  We have always had Pictionary at home and I have grown up playing it.  My daughter is 20 months old and I hope that she too will now grow up playing it thanks to the Family Edition that was sent to me.

Photo of Pictionary Family Edition by Mattel



In the first photo in this review you will see a photo of us playing the game over Christmas. You can tell it is Christmas by the lovely, tasty TIN of Cadbury’s Roses Chocolates in the corner of the the shot! Had it been a box of Roses you may not have guessed it was Christmas but with a tin you KNOW it is!  For me Christmas is all about the over indulgence in chocolate and excessive playing of board games. As a family we will sit for hours playing board games and eating too much chocolate…that is good old family life and what I want my daughter to come to treasure as she grows up.


Photo of Pictionary Family Edition by Mattel



The cards have 5 different categories of words on them and they are as follows:-

 Object, Person/Place/Animal,Action,Difficult and Miscellaneous.

Each card is double sided and there are 5 different words (one from each category) on each side.  This equals hours of sketching fun!

Here is an example of some words from a child’s card:-

It’s Hot (This is the theme of the card)

1. The Sun – Object
2. Match – Person/Place/Animal
3. Oven – Action
4. Steam-Difficult
5. Fire-Miscellaneous

Here is an example of some words from an adult’s card:-

There is no theme written on the adult cards.

1. Iron – Object
2. Home Office – Person / Place/ Animal
3. Protect – Action
4. Jigsaw Puzzle – Difficult
5. Halloween – Miscellaneous



Photo of cards in Pictionary Family Edition by Mattel





You Can….

• draw anything related to the word, no matter how tenuous the link
• break words down into a number of syllables
• draw “dock” for doc” or “flu” for “flue”

You Cannot…

• use “ears” for “sounds like”or dashes to show the number of letters in the word (I’m afraid we sometimes cheat and don’t follow this rule!)
• use letters or numbers (oh dear…sometimes we don’t follow this one either!)
• speak to your teammates (Now we definitely don’t do this…we SHOUT at each other! Trying to find out more clues other than the sketches!)
• use sign language (WE FAIL….we tend to do all of the cannot rules but still have enormous amounts of fun and still only guess correctly half the time…even when cheating. after all…Some rules are made to be broken, aren’t they? )



Photo of components of Pictionary Family Edition by Mattel



Photo of Pictionary Family Edition by Mattel