Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Are you Down to Draw?
Draw Your Own Conclusions is a party game for 4-8 people who are working together to draw the best pictures they can so that their fellow drawers can guess what their assigned picture is. The catch is that each player can only draw a single type of line or shape and can only draw, at most, five of those shapes or lines. This cooperative creation evolves as several players all work to add their shapes to the drawing so that the guessing player can hope to figure out what the picture is. Let’s jump in and talk briefly about gameplay.
In Draw Your Own Conclusions, each player starts with a drawing pad, marker, and specific shape only they can draw. Each player then receives a clue card that contains six different items or things to draw and a category that acts as a hint for the guessing player. To start a round, one player will roll the die to tell each player the unique thing they are working to draw and each player writes the name of the player to their right or, for larger groups, the player 2 spaces to the right of them.
Once players know what they are drawing, they will write that thing on the second layer of the drawing board so that other helping players can also know what to draw. They do this in a way that the guessing player cannot see this information when they attempt to guess.
Play continues with each player working on the board in front of them. They can opt to draw 0-5 of their assigned shape based on how helpful they think they can be with their assigned shape. Once complete, they pass the boards to the left and this continues until each player receives a board with their name on it. Then it is time for guessing.
Get your Guess Game Going
Each player has three guess tokens they can use. If they guess incorrectly they flip a token and may then ask what a specific shape or line is on the drawing to get a hint. Players may only give one word hints in response. This continues until the player correctly guesses the item on their board or runs out of guess tokens. Once all players have had a chance to guess their board, you can see who has the most tokens and reset for a new round of play by resetting the boards, clue cards, and shapes for each player. Since this is a coop game, I like to have the table see their total token count to incentivise great teamwork to get the highest number possible.
A Doodle Bop or a Doodle Flop?
Draw Your Own Conclusions is an enjoyable party game that, in my opinion, fixes a lot of issues I had with other drawing games. I am not a talented artist so I was often frustrated with my performance in these types of games, as were other players. That is not the case for Draw Your Own Conclusions. It is light and accessible to all players. Since you can only draw a single thing, no one is running away and drawing the Mona Lisa. Also Draw Your Own Conclusions is not competitive in that players are working together on the drawings. Each person is required to contribute different pieces for the artwork to be understood so teamwork is essential.
I also love the laughable moments that this title produced. It was crazy to see the final product on some of the drawings and even more fun to watch the poor player attempts to make heads or tails out of them. This is by far a great, light party game.
With all of that praise still ringing in the air, there are a few things I want to make note of. In my time with the game I did notice a few items such as some guess tokens and the die missing from my copy. These items were easily replaced and did not affect the quality of the game in the least. There was, however, a bigger issue I encountered: some of the items on the cards did not at all align with their categories. For instance, I have a card with the category “Living”. Five of the items made sense such as cat and goldfish, but imagine my shock when TNT was also on this card. While humorous, I did let the guessing player know to disregard the category hint as it was not helpful. A similar situation with another living card had the grim reaper as a drawing option. Now I do want to state that I was fortunate enough to get a pre-production copy of the game so I am sure this will not be a problem for final retail copies. These issues did not affect the fun moments of the game but in the interest of transparency I did want to state my full experience with the title.
The only other thing to note here is that Draw Your Own Conclusions is a party game. There is limited depth or strategy here so it may not be for all gamers. With that being said, Draw Your Own Conclusions is one of the only drawing games that I enjoyed playing. It was a fresh take on a very tired niche for me and I found that to be refreshing. While my personal experience with a pre-production copy may have lacked a touch of polish, I am very confident in Grey Fox Games to tidy up the final product and present what I feel is a great addition to your party game collection. If you are looking for a light, accessible title (regardless of artistic talent) that seats a lot of people, Draw Your Own Conclusions is one you should definitely check out!
Draw Your Own Conclusions
Genre: Party/Drawing
Pros: Accessible, Non-competitive, Unique
Cons: Non-strategic, Can be Repetitive
Rating: 6/10 A great addition to a played out genre.
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