Telestrations

One of our favorite games to play together is Telestrations, a version of the telephone game where players illustrate a word and pass it on for the next player to guess what they drew and write the guess down. The following player illustrates that guess and passes the illustrations to their neighbor and so on, until the sketchbook makes a full circle and returns to the player who came up with the original word. Four to eight players can take part, so there’re four to eight sketchbooks circulating simultaneously. Most of the time, the final guess is not the same as the original word but bears some resemblance to it in this way or another, almost always hilarious. I don’t remember us ever laughing that hard, literally until our abdominal muscles hurt.

In January, Simon started a project to make a digital version of Telestrations. It was a very tough server side programming project. Originally, Simon tried to make his own socket library with five protocols (see screen shot below), but later abandoned that idea and switched to socket.io. He seems to have lost interest in the project along the way, probably because of the difficulty level, but he did manage to test the protocol for two users and had a lot of fun pondering the architecture.