Game Preview: Doodle Dash, or Faster, Pussycat! Draw! Draw!

Doodle Dash, one of the debut games from Norwegian publisher Chilifox Games, isn't a flashy design that delivers a BRAND NEW GAMING EXPERIENCE the way that most titles are marketed. Instead this game for 3-7 players from the design team Fridtjof Buvarp, Maija Buvarp, Pauline Buvarp, Åsmund Svensson, and Eilif Svensson delivers what it promises — a quick-playing, drawing-based party game — in a clean and efficient manner that doesn't overstay its welcome.

In the game, each player takes turns trying to guess what everyone else has drawn. You draw a card facing away from you with that card listing seven items, give a number from 1-7, then avert your eyes while everyone else races to draw whatever person, object, name, or title you chose. As soon as someone finishes their drawing, they grab the golden cylinder to indicate their firstness. The next player to finish grabs the die and keeps rolling it until either everyone else has finished their drawings or they roll the lone STOP sign on the die, which forces everyone else to stop drawing immediately.

The cylinder holder reveals their drawing first, and if the guesser identifies whatever the thing is, they each score 1 point. If not, the die-holder reveals their drawing, scoring 1 point along with the guesser if the latter can now identify the thing in question. If not, all other drawers reveal their images, with each of them scoring 1 point along with the guesser if the ID is finally made.

What's this?

The challenge of the game is obvious: Drawing quickly makes it difficult to draw clearly, so how much do you want to lean one way or the other? What's the essence of the object from your point of view, and can you draw that in such a way that the guesser will identify it...and can you do it before someone else does?

Sometimes that essence is surprisingly common, and I imagine such drawing experiments already take place in sociology classes to record how people represent different objects.

Cats must have three whiskers!

The other challenge that comes with weighing speed over specificity in your drawing is that — depending on the object in question — the second revealer has an advantage over the first since the guesser now has two images to ponder and compare. What might have been unclear from the initial scribble now comes into focus, although sometimes you really need to see ALL the remaining drawings before you know what the object is.

And sometimes even those images don't help when certain drawers misread the card in question or depict something other than what was written. In the image below, for example, only the image in the lower left really matches what you're supposed to guess.

I've played Doodle Dash three times on a review copy from Chilifox Games, once each with 3, 4, and 7 players, and the game does what it's trying to do. The experience was more enjoyable with the largest crowd, mostly because it was fun to see what people drew, whether you were guessing or not.

Sometimes the objects had a singular "correct" way of being drawn, akin to the drawings of "cat food" above, as when everyone depicted a telescope the exact same way. In those cases, the game was about pure speed rather than about trying to decipher what was important to depict, and I found those rounds less interesting since I wasn't interpreting what to draw, but simply trying to push an image out as quickly as possible. I like that type of challenge in Pictionary when two teams are going head-to-head, but I think that's because you're drawing in front of the guessers and responding to them in real time, modifying your image on the fly to lead them to the answer; in this game, you whip out the drawing and that's it.

I learned that I cannot draw a horse

For more on the game and how it compares to three other quick-drawing party games, check out this video: