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Categories and difficulty
The categories are kitchen, school, household, outdoors, tools, toys, clothing, technology and sports equipment. Some objects sit in more than one group, so a backpack can turn up under school, outdoors or clothing.
The difficulty levels are about drawing and acting, not about how rare the object is:
- Easy: simple shapes almost anyone can sketch or mime, like a spoon, a kite or a helmet.
- Medium: objects that need a detail or two before people get them, like a kettle, a hammock or a stapler.
- Hard: things that look like other things, or are tricky to show, such as a colander, a protractor or a thermostat.
Drawing games
Quick draw
Each player generates one easy object and has 30 seconds to draw it. Pass the drawings around and see who can name every one. It is a good warm up before a longer game.
Team sketch relay
Generate one medium object per round. The first player on a team draws for ten seconds, then passes the pen to the next player, who keeps adding to the same drawing. The team that guesses its object first wins the round.
Blind contour challenge
Generate a hard object, then draw it without looking at your paper. The results are often funny, and it is a real exercise art teachers use to train the eye.
Charades and acting games
For charades, players mime using the object rather than drawing it. Kitchen, tools and sports equipment work best, because there is an obvious action: stirring with a whisk, hammering a nail, shooting a puck with a hockey stick. Agree before you start that pointing at real objects in the room is not allowed.
Another option is a guessing round called "What am I?". One player looks at a random object and gives one clue at a time, such as "I live in a kitchen" or "I am usually made of metal". The others try to guess with as few clues as possible.
Classroom and writing ideas
- Describe it: students pick a random object and write five sentences about it without naming it. Classmates read and guess.
- Inventions: generate two objects and design a new tool that combines them.
- Persuasive pitch: each student gets one object and has 30 seconds to convince the class it is the most useful thing in the house.
- Alphabet sort: generate 20 objects and put them in alphabetical order.
For living things instead of objects, use the random animal generator, and for people, places and ideas, try the random noun generator. When you want a break from drawing, play a round of Unlimited Canuckle.