Pictionary, charades, Lego and Minecraft collide in sculpture-guessing game Bilder

A new party game wants to do for wooden blocks what Pictionary did for, er, pencils.

Bilder is the latest project from Monkeyshine Games, the newly-rechristened studio behind cheeky social card game Deer Lord.

In essence, it’s kind of a cross between guessing classics like Pictionary and charades, but with the creative sculpturing of Lego and Minecraft.

Players draw a ‘What’ card that decides what they’ll be trying to create out of the game’s collection of wooden blocks, which vary from standard shapes such as circles, squares and triangles to more specific forms like dogs, human beings and vehicles.

Each card has a choice of two answers, each attached to a general category relating to each of the letters in the game’s name: beings, imagined, locations, devices, events and ‘rest’. So you might be trying to create Napoleon, or the action of giving birth.

The builder puts together their selection of pieces in silence, and the first person to guess correctly gets the card. If you manage to spell out Bilder with your collected cards, you win.

To make it worthwhile for the builder, they can choose to draw an optional extra ‘How’ card from a revealed selection of three, which introduces an additional challenge. These also have a letter attached and count towards victory, but make building harder with requirements from the player’s wrists having to remain touching throughout or setting a 30-second time limit.

The whole game can currently be downloaded for free on Monkeyshine’s website, although you’ll need to lasercut the tiles yourself (or replace them with something else) to play properly.

A boxed version is planned to go live on Kickstarter on July 1st, which will include handmade wooden blocks.