Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This game shows a lot of promise, but right now it seems pretty half-baked. The basic idea is simple: the box contains a small box of standard Pictionary clues and a “pen”. The “pen” basically is a small flashlight whose tip glows red while in standby and green when the holder presses a button to indicate that s/he is “drawing”. A teammate points a phone/tablet’s camera at the first player, while running a special app that runs the game. The app superimposes lines on screen when the first person presses the green light button on the pen, and the whole thing can be “mirrored” (iOS) or “cast” (Android) to a nearby TV. The other team watches the TV and guesses the clue based on the drawing and related hijinks. Hilarity ensues. Problems: (1) Inexplicably, there is no landscape mode using iOS even though EVERY TV IN THE WORLD operates only in landscape mode. This means that when mirroring the game to a TV, which is it main use case, the game video is vertical, small and crammed into the center of the TV screen with tons of wasted space around it. (2) The iOS app also doesn’t properly handle the built-in camera’s native resolution on my iPhone XS Max. It’s distorted and stretched vertically, which makes the portrait-only mode on the TV look even worse, if that can be imagined. (3) The app can’t keep up with fast motion. If the drawer gets excited and moves the pen quickly, the app loses tracking and the lines get choppy or lost altogether. (4) The app is easily confused by background noise. “Don’t wear red,” the instructions advise. “Don’t wear green” either, and don’t use the pen in front of backgrounds with red or green objects or, god forbid, any lights or brightly lit windows because any of these things will make the app lose tracking of the pen. “Otherwise”, it’s a fun novelty and amusing to play with family or at parties.