Are Your Eyes Sharp Enough to Win at Pictureka Giant Edition?

Search among rocket ships, sharks, and clowns to find bones and butterflies, or maybe something with wheels! Race against your opponents and be sure to not be the last person left searching.

Published by Spin Master Games, this oversized edition of Pictureka is designed for 2-4 players, and plays in roughly 20 minutes.

Gameplay

The game board is placed in the center of the table. It shows a huge array of colorful images and figures. On your turn, you choose the color of challenge you will be doing (green, red, or blue), and then you draw a challenge card and place it face-up for everyone to see. Players then begin searching for an image on the game board based on the challenge color you chose and the challenge card. Green will have players finding an image within a certain category — for example, it might be an image of something you can eat or something with wings. Blue shows three unique images and you have to find one of these on the board. Red has you finding an image that matches a word such as bones or drinks.

When you find an image, you announce it and point to it. Other players cannot point to the same image you did, so they have to keep looking. The last player to find one (or who is unable to find one) takes the challenge card and it is now the next player’s turn. The game ends once one player has collected five challenge cards, and the player with the fewest cards wins the game.

Review

Pictureka! Giant Edition is a great fit for families and, despite being marketed towards children, is actually quite fun to play with an adult game group, as well. Picture searches can be challenging for all ages, and the images here are colorful, varied, and fun to search through.

There’s an impressive range to the pictures, and they’re quite creative. Sometimes you get lucky and will remember a picture you saw previously and know just where it is when you need it for a challenge card, so there is a bit of memory to the game. But there are so many images that this doesn’t happen often, and it’s also easy to lose track of exactly where you saw something, so the game always stays challenging.

Not having played the original edition, we can’t say if the giant version is better. However, we did like the large, oversized gameboard, which made it easy for everyone around the table to see the images. It is made of a plastic-like material that is more similar to a fabric than a board. It’s meant to be a material that can be played with both inside and outside, and we could see ourselves taking this on a picnic and spreading it out on the ground. The challenge cards are also nice and large, which makes it easy for everyone to read. This is especially helpful when completing a blue challenge and being able to reference easily which images you are searching for.

Pictureka! Giant Edition was a very pleasant surprise. We expected something very simple that only children would really enjoy given the marketing on the box, but we had a lot of fun with it. It has the feel of a party game, but a more quiet one, as players spend a lot of time searching for images. However, you might have some downtime if you spot an image quickly and other players take longer to search. Overall, we had a lot of fun with Pictureka! Giant Edition and think it would be a great fit for families.

Pros: Range and style of images, size of the board and cards make it easy for multiple players to see, enjoyable for all ages

Cons: Downtime will vary, heavy marketing towards children might make adults reluctant to try it

Disclosure: we received a complimentary review copy of these games.