Glyphics

• Designer: Eric Olsen 
• Publisher: The Op
• Players: 3-99
• Age: 8+
• Time: 15 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3YxbPBj
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Bored with charades? Terrible at drawing? Then Glyphics is for you! Simply choose a word from your card, create using any shapes you need, and be the fastest guesser to win a point! Packed with a variety of game pieces and a vast array of prompts, every game night becomes a uniquely engaging tabletop adventure that’s never the same twice.

To start, decide whether you’re playing with the easy peasy cards (orange) or the standard card (blue).  Regardless of type, each has six prompts on it for the game.  The 40 Glyphics pieces are scattered on the table.

One player goes first, and they are the Builder.  Everyone else is a Guesser.  The Builder looks at their card and chooses a prompt they has not yet been correctly guessed.  They announce out loud whether it is a noun, verb or phrase.

A 60-second timer is started (not included in the box, so use your phone) – and the builder now uses any of the Glyphics to build an illustration.  All the guessers are free to yell out answers, and the first person to blurt out the right answer will end the round.  At this point, both the Builder and the correct guesser will score 2 points if the clue was a phrase and 1 point if it was a noun or a verb.  Everyone else doesn’t get squat.  The round can also end if the timer runs out.  If so, no one scores. 

The Builder role moves clockwise one position and the process is repeated. Keep doing this until all players have had a chance to do 5 prompts on their card.  At this point, the player with the most points wins.

My thoughts on the game

Glyphics is a game in the Pictionary vein of party games, and it works pretty well.  The hook here is that you have to use the little plastic pieces to engender the correct guess.  It actually feels very much like Pictionary the Card Game – though here you don’t have card borders to get in the way of your combinations.

Rounds don’t take very long as most of the prompts are common things.  We’ve found that it is more likely for someone to be able to guess the right answer than have the time run out.  As a result, many of the turns take much less than a minute to play and score.

It’s obviously very simple to teach and play, and really anyone can join in.  I suppose that I’d just give younger folks the Easy Peasy cards and leave the blue Regular cards for the adults.  That being said, I have found that there is definitely still a high amount of variation in the overall difficulty of words on the cards, and if you’re really the competitive sort of Glyphics player, you could be dead in the water if you draw one of the cards that seems to have six impossible prompts on it.

I’d really normally give more commentary on the game, but in this case, there’s not much else to say.  Pick a prompt, make it with the Glyphics, score points when someone guesses it right.  Repeat.  It’s perfect for parties and holiday get togethers.  It is less awesome for crunchy game nights.  But you surely already knew that.

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3YxbPBj