Pantone: The Board Game
Tonight we had our first play of Pantone for family game night. It's another drawing guesser - you have to evoke your subject using just colour swatches.
The components are somewhat low-quality, with weak incorporation of the Pantone theme, and it requires not-included timers and manual score-keeping. It's possible that the timers thing is just a nod to the built-in timer most people have on their phones. The lack of a scoring-track-style component is also not a huge barrier, but the box is massive and mostly empty, and it's rare to have to crack out a score pad these days, so it stuck out. Also, the game requires that the players share a set of cultural touchstones (and that they have a lot of overlap with the designers), so it may not be ideal for play with a really diverse group, but in our group of mid-40s nerds, it was fine. Still, we did almost immediately institute a house rule increasing the number of cards you got to select your subjects from to allow for more "I have no idea who this is," buffer, as well as a house rule that during card selection you're allowed to Google Image Search a subject if you can't remember what they look like well enough to depict them. (I have a horrible visual memory.)
Despite all of this, we had a lot of fun. After an initial round of guesses, you give a series of clues dictated on the card, with the point value (for both you and whoever guesses it) going down with each clue provided. Several characters were guessed mostly or almost entirely based on the clues rather than the depictions, but there were several instances where someone guessed another player's abstract "Nobody's going to get this," blob with no clues at all or with far fewer clues than the artist thought would be necessary, and that's highly satisfying for both the guesser and the artist.
I wouldn't say that three players was a great number for it; I think it would play better with more. However, it was still fun with three. I'm not sure how often we'll crack it out, but I think it hit the spot for something light with no setup time that still offered a bit of a fun challenge.