I always thought hieroglyphics were a pretty cool way to communicate, but if it weren’t for the Rosetta Stone, we’d just have to… guess what those awesome Egyptian reliefs were trying to depict. Glyphics takes that conundrum and gamifies it. Are those two squiggles and a triangle a sailboat at sea, or a chip in a bowl of dip? Make your best guess to outscore your opponents! Glyphics is a party game for three or more players, with a play time of 20 minutes.
Game Overview:
Each player draws a card with six prompts on it. This will be their only card for the course of the game. On your turn, choose one of the prompts to try to recreate with the plastic shapes included in the game. The other players have 60 seconds to guess the answer. When the answer is correctly guessed, both the builder and the guesser will score points (1 if the prompt was a noun or verb, 2 if the prompt was a phrase).
As the builder, the person creating the picture, you can’t talk or make sounds, use pieces to spell out the clue, or act it out. But you can move pieces to indicate motion or even use the included stand in the game if you want a piece to be upright.
Play continues until each player has been the builder five times, and the player with the highest score wins!
Game Experience:
I tend to like these types of imperfect information guessing games. Basically, this is just Pictionary with pieces, which is nice for people who don’t like drawing, or if you simply want to change up the experience. It’s also very similar to another game in my collection called Imagine, which uses transparent cards with images on them to achieve pretty much the same thing, but the pieces in this game are a little easier to work with.
As these types of games go, I thought this one was pretty fun. There are a variety of shapes included, and I always found what I needed to create the image I wanted. And the bright green pieces are pretty cool looking, too. Some prompts are definitely harder than others, with the phrases generally being the trickiest, which is why they award extra points, but I didn’t feel any of the prompts were too hard, and someone was usually able to guess them.
When we played with our kids, there were some phrases they weren’t familiar with, so it gave the adults at the table an advantage, and I found that if two players did well, their scores would end up similar, because they would usually guess each other’s prompts. That being the case, I think this game is best played with people of equal skill levels. There is a smaller deck of easy cards in the game, however, which kids can use, but there really aren’t many of these.
I didn’t love the scoring system and found myself wishing it were a cooperative game. The builder and the guesser scoring the same amount of points works, but it just didn’t feel super interesting. Of course, you could always just play the game as an activity without bothering with scores.
Final Thoughts:
Glyphics requires imagination and some out-of-the-box thinking. For players who know they like this sort of “guess the ambiguous image” game, it will be a great fit. But if you don’t like that kind of game, then this one isn’t likely to change your mind.
I enjoyed seeing people’s creative side come out as they played, and it was interesting to see the pieces they chose to create their prompt, when perhaps I would have chosen something else- so there are multiple ways to convey an idea. The prompts seem to be a nice balance of easy and difficult, but I think it will shine best with players of a similar skill level, so nobody runs away with the game.
Final Rating: 3.5 Stars – A creative twist on the Charades/ Pictionary genre of guessing games!
Hits:
• Encourages creativity
• No artistic skill required
Misses:
• Scoring felt somewhat tacked on
• Can have a runaway leader
