QUICK DRAWS

You’re sitting at the dining room table, surrounded by three teammates, and a glance at the one-minute sand timer tells you that you’re running out of time. Armed with only a pencil and a pad of paper, you continue to scribble madly, drawing a stick-figure person with arms bending up at the elbow in a flex. “Bodybuilder!” yells one player. “Strong!” yells another. Now you take your pencil, and, where the arm muscles of your stick-person should be, you draw two U-like dips like Popeye’s biceps when he hasn’t eaten his spinach. “Weak!” someone yells. You’re close now, so you frantically draw seven dots, circling the fifth one and making arrows that point to it. “Seven weeks!” “Five weeks!” “9 1/2 weeks!” your teammates yell. Then from the team at the other end of the table you hear, “Thursday!!” That’s the answer.

As the other team rejoices with high fives, the pencil drops from your hand. This is what it feels like to lose an “all-play” duel in the new game called Pictionary.

Pictionary was invented in Seattle by Rob Angel and exploded onto the game market in June 1986-more than 400,000 were sold nationally in its first nine months.

To say it’s doing well in Dallas is an understatement. Local toy merchants have not been able to keep the game on their shelves since before Christmas. To field the many calls received each day, local toy stores have set up waiting lists.

Pictionary is basically charades on paper with five categories: person/place, object, action, difficult, and all-play.

In an all-play, the most exciting-and loudest-part of the game, the artists from all the teams look at the same word, and when the sand timer starts, teams race to see which can guess the word first. It’s fast, crazy, and riotously funny. Every team blurts out guesses while the artist scribbles frantically.

A friend once told me that mastery kills a game. If that’s true, then Pictionary will be around for a long time. One of the game’s real virtues is that it’s never quite the same twice. The way it is played is the same, the game board is the same, but the drawings and interpretations are as different as the creativity of the players, The variety of words also keeps the game fresh.

Pictionary is popu-lar with families as well as yuppies, which sets it apart from Trivial Pursuit.

A youngster can do a lot better-and have more fun-trying to draw a desert than trying to figure out which one is the largest on the continent of Africa. And if you think artistically inclined individuals have an advantage in this game, think again. Even Julian Schnabel would have a hard time drawing “unanimous.”