My family consists of my wife, my 10-year-old daughter, my 16-year-old son, and my 19-year-old son—and my mother-in-law joins in when she’s around, too. Finding a game that everyone across those wide age gaps and varying board game experience can play and genuinely enjoy is always a challenge.
Usually, the most effective hits are easy to learn and have a relatively short play time. Games like Codenames, Telestrations, Go Nuts for Donuts, Sushi Go!, and Dixit hit our table rotation regularly, which should give you an idea of the kind of games I’m on the lookout for on family game night.
I don’t get to introduce new games very often, so I must be very selective when I do. When I had the opportunity to review Mind the Lines, I thought it might be a game worth introducing. Let’s find out if it was.
Gameplay Overview:
Mind the Lines is a light, cooperative drawing and deduction party game where players work together over four rounds to identify secret words drawn on boards with random dotted lines. It’s a quick play, usually wrapping up in about 20 to 30 minutes at the most.
Instead of sketching freehand, your drawing must be drawn on the dotted lines. Each round gives players a strict two-minute timer to complete their line-traced artwork on the board
Once the drawing phase is done, each player’s secret word card, along with another random word card for each player, is shuffled together and laid out on the table. All players also reveal their drawings.
Without any input from other players, each player takes a turn removing a word on the table that they think wasn’t drawn. The goal at the end of the round is to have each player’s secret word card remaining on the table.
Game Experience:
The first few times you play, trying to draw a recognizable picture strictly by following the grid lines can feel a bit frustrating. However, you quickly realize it’s not that hard when there are word cards on the table to guess what was drawn—having those clues makes deciphering even the weirdest drawings much easier…maybe too easy.
Before playing, I was concerned that the two-minute timer would not be enough time, and people would constantly be asking for extra time to finish their drawings. That never ended up being an issue! In fact, most of the time, people were done well before the timer ran out.
After a couple of rounds in easy mode, we shifted to hard mode to make things more challenging. Hard mode forces you to draw more abstract concepts with your sketches, which definitely steps up the puzzle. But whether you’re playing easy or hard mode, once players realize you can just focus on drawing those distinct, iconic features of their word, it becomes pretty easy to guess what was drawn.
On top of that, there’s a pool of words you’re choosing from, which significantly narrows down the possibility of what was drawn. I might house rule just guessing what was drawn instead, using the cards on the table for more of a challenge.
The cooperative dynamic worked fine for us with no real tension. As a fun house rule, we liked to let everyone shout out their guesses for what was drawn right after we removed the incorrect cards, but just before revealing what was actually drawn. That part was probably the most fun.
My wife really enjoys the game because it’s relaxing to play in the evening. There’s no heavy thinking involved—just some casual drawing and guessing. It’s a light filler game that anyone can pick up and learn in a minute or two. While there are a few chuckles and “ooooh” moments around the table, it doesn’t really generate any big emotional highs or lows.
It was enjoyable but not exciting.
From a component standpoint, Mind the Lines is a bit of a mixed bag. On the positive side, it’s great to have dry-erase markers that work well right out of the box, which isn’t always a guarantee with drawing games. However, after just a few rounds, the dry-erase boards don’t wipe completely clean, so they look used very quickly, which is disappointing. Fortunately, they are still clean enough to be easily usable for future games without interfering with your lines.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you will go through cards pretty quickly. Because you draw a lot of cards each round, the card churn is high. For example, with 3 players, each round uses 6 cards across 4 rounds, totaling 24 cards per game. In our game of 5 players, we went through 50 cards in a single sitting!
Setup and clean-up can literally be done in less than 30 seconds, which is a huge reason why it will actually hit the table more often than it deserves.
Final Thoughts:
If I have more time on family game night, I think I’ll always pull out Telestrations over Mind the Lines for a whiteboard drawing game and laugh-out-loud moments. But if I only have a quick 20 to 30 minutes to spare, I can definitely see pulling out Mind the Lines. I’ll gladly bring it to the table when we have a short amount of time because everyone in the family will join in, and I don’t have to worry about explaining rules.
Final Score: 3 Stars – A simple, relaxing family game that’s easy to teach for a quick 20-minute session, even if it doesn’t mind the lines enough to create huge table thrills. I don’t mind Mind the Lines.
Hits:
• Lightning-fast setup in under 30 seconds
• Two-minute timer is generous
• Relaxing, low-stress gameplay
• Line-tracing constraint offers a fresh creative challenge
Misses:
• Dry-erase boards don’t wipe completely clean after just a few rounds
• Heavy card churn
• Drawing distinct, iconic features combined with the process of elimination makes guessing too easy
• Lacks the big emotional highs and non-stop laughter of top-tier party games
*picture one was a lighthouse, picture two was wealth
