Pictionary is fun. Problem is, it’s not quite as fun when your drawing skills produce unintelligible images and the game turns into people making fun of your nonexistent artistic talents. You’ve always maintained that your friends just suck at interpreting your artistic creations. Soon, you can prove your instincts right (or wrong) with the Mattel Pictionary VS AI.
Instead of playing Pictionary with family and friends, this game lets you play with artificial intelligence that’s been trained to recognize images. That way, you can have a well-trained AI actually guessing your drawings, so you can, finally, find out whether the people you play with just don’t know how to interpret your art or if you really should stick to Scrabble, like your ex always said.
The Mattel Pictionary Vs AI is a tabletop game that combines a game board, drawing boards, cards, and a web app for a fresh take on the classic word-guessing game. Like traditional Pictionary, players draw from the deck and sketch the word that’s written on the card within a 30-second window. All players must do their drawings at the same time. Instead of having other players guess the word based on your drawing creation the built-in AI on the app does the guessing, so you won’t be able to blame the other players if the AI can’t identify what the heck you sketched on the pad.
Before the AI makes its verdict, other players can bet points on whether or not it can identify the picture correctly. If the AI guesses right, then the player who drew the sketch gets points, while other players can also get points if they make the correct bet. Those points determine each player’s move on the accompanying game board, with the first player to make it to the end being the game’s eventual winner.
The Mattel Pictionary Vs AI also adds some additional challenges to the game to keep things spicy. Specifically, each round comes with own special game alterations, such as requiring the players to draw with their eyes closed, using their non-dominant hands, and other handicaps that make it more challenging to produce intelligible illustrations. Yeah… that sounds fun. Will there be a challenge to draw with your feet? We’re not sure, but we definitely will appreciate it if they have that, as it makes for a genuinely chaotic game night.
Do note, the game doesn’t actually use a smartphone app. Instead, it uses a web app, so all you need is a web browser and a camera. That means, you can play this with a smartphone, a tablet, or even a laptop. Heck, you can play it on the TV if it has a webcam and a browser. According to the outfit, they’re using an AI that’s been trained on Google’s Quick, Draw dataset, which is supposedly the world’s largest doodling data set, so it has a good load of sample sketches to draw from.
The Mattel Pictionary Vs AI is now available on preorder from the outfit’s website, with shipment slated for early October.
- The Pictionary Vs. AI team has improved the scanning experience, making gameplay much more...
