Learn more about your favourite party game.

It was the year 1985 when the world got the taste of Pictionary, and we can’t have enough of it. Our sleepovers with friends, those evening with family and cousins could not be considered complete without a fun-filled game of Pictionary. Though Pictionary depends on your artistic prowess, you can make it fun even without it. A fun twist to the traditional charades, participants have to take turns to guess the phrase or word by sketching on a paper. The real fun lies in making participants guess phrases and words that are difficult to draw. Pictionary was brought by Mattel in the year 2001, and it sold about 38 million copies worldwide. Here are some of the fascinating facts about Pictionary.

It was invented by a waiter to liven up social gatherings.

A waiter named Robert Angel was the first one to think of Pictionary in the 80s while working in Seattle. He invented a fun game to liven up the party and social events. He used to pick up a random word from a dictionary and then attempted to illustrate that. The popularity of his game increased, and he decided to design the game, started the inventory and distributed the game himself.

It was produced in an apartment.

Robert Angel had initially a lot of trouble producing the game as he has no financial backing and no prior experience. He started producing the game from his own apartment. The business boomed at last when Nordstrom department store placed an order, and it was a smashing hit. Soon, the stores were out of copies of the game. Surprisingly, it was the second-best-selling game after Nintendo in the year 1987.

Apparently, people got into fights because of Pictionary.

Due to low stocks and high demand, stores used to out of Pictionary very quickly. Interestingly, Pictionary led to a fistfight over the last copy in a store near California.

You can even play Pictionary with AI.

A version of the game was developed by the Allen Institute of Artificial intelligence, Seattle, named “Iconary”. This game allows user to depict a concept from the series of icons. If you try to draw them, the software will auto-complete the image and guess the meaning of the image.

You can even play the game in the air!

You can play Pictionary in the air, thanks to Mattel’s “Pictionary air” introduced in the year 2019. In this, the player can draw using a stylus, and their drawing would appear on television or any monitor.

So, which one of these facts surprised you the most?