Pencil Nose – Drawing with your Nose!

[Ad- gifted product] When it comes to games, we often play a lot of board games as a family and have moved towards toys that can be played together instead of individually. Pencil Nose could be considered a tabletop game, but in a more children’s toy sense, sort of like Pictionary, but with it’s own unique twist! Whether it’s a board game or a collective toy, we did have a ton of fun playing it together!

Pencil Nose has a lot to do with the title; each player wears a special pair of glasses with a dry erase marker on their nose. Then, they hold a transparent screen, that they use to draw on, with a card in the slot above it. These cards have two sides; red and blue, with different words on each side. The player must decide ahead of time what side they are doing (either by being assigned a color or being on a specific color team), before drawing!

There isn’t a timer in Pencil Nose, it’s more about drawing and guessing. Though, if you add a timer, you could likely make it a more competitive game! We took Pencil Nose on holiday, as Robin normally chooses at least one board game to take with us, in case we have a bit of downtime in the evenings. We had a fantastic time playing Pencil Nose as a family and quite enjoyed the simple gameplay of it.

There is a bit of a learning curve when setting up the game – you do need to pop the top off the dry erase marker, put this on the back of the marker, then stick it to the nose. If you try to use the other two pen holders, the marker will just keep falling off. Once we discovered that, thanks to Amelia’s suggestion, we found it much easier to draw and not drop the marker. This isn’t really on any of the instructions or anything, which is why we struggled so much! I am not even sure what the extra plastic holders are for, if I am honest.

The words that need to be drawn on the cards are quite different! Some have some easy ones like cat, while others like Big Ben and Santa were far tricker. As we are just playing casually, we allowed hints and tricks. The real fun was in drawing with the tip of your nose, while staring at the board. It’s just an interesting perspective that feels so unnatural and fun. There are a lot of different cards as well, and though some have the same words as others, there is enough variety to keep things interesting!

Kai was the most serious about his drawing, working very hard on a “moving the board, not the marker” strategy that had him creating pretty neat pictures. Amelia and Robin were often hint givers, quickly getting through their cards and drawing. It’s a lot of fun watching how the drawings pan out and guessing! Pencil Nose is not a game I would have ever thought would work, but it does, extremely well!

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