DRAWING CONCLUSIONS
(Visual Trivia)
Teams of three begin the game separated. Each player is equipped with a writing utensil and a “drawing sheet”: a piece of vellum marked off into numbered squares. Players are independently shown collections of lines and shapes that they must re-create by drawing them in the squares on the drawing sheets. The team then reunites and stacks the drawing sheets on top of each other in various ways to create recognizable images when the individual drawings are combined. The team answers trivia questions that reference the combined drawings.
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I devised a cooperative drawing game called Drawing Conclusions for a birthday game party in 2007 and presented it again at a minicon in Los Angeles. In this version of the game, the artist produced a large based on verbal instructions from a series of “communicators” and then answered questions related to the completed picture. The game was intended as a variation on the classic picture memory quizzes in puzzle magazines. The game was not successful due to the difficulty of the drawing task and large amount of down time players endured when not participating in a drawing round. I brainstormed a bit more on the game mechanics and developed a new system in which combined drawing would be incorporated by see-through paper rather than verbal instructions. I also replaced the single large picture with a series of smaller images. I proposed this new version of Drawing Conclusions as a main program activity for the 2009 convention in Baltimore and was accepted.
While coming up with ideas for images, I quickly realized that dividing a whole into three parts was generally inefficient. A better approach was to pick a basic shape, e.g. a triangle, and finding two other shapes that the first could combine with to make two complete images, e.g. another triangle to make the star of David and a series of lines to make the light prism on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. I also strove to find ways to use all possible pairings of three part images to create three wholes. The golf green/musical note/fried egg triad was the most successful of these attempts. The three drawing sheets, each marked off into twelve squares, produced images for 24 trivia questions. The game was well received at the Baltimore convention. Many recall that the game received a standing ovation for its instructions. The part of the instructions that received accolades was the revelation that the drawing sheets would be stacked in various combinations and not simply as in unified stack of three sheets. Lance Nathan also praised the game for the diversity of the subject matter, noting that every member of the team had an opportunity to have an aha moment in recognizing a combined image and tying it to the trivia question. I reran Drawing Conclusions once for a birthday game party and also provided moderator sets for others to run at game events.
life as a puzzle 