Mind The Lines - How To Play

0:07 Hi and welcome to Watch It Played. My name is Rodney Smith and in this video we're going to learn the two to six player game Mind the Lines designed by Dee Zeeben Batzies and published by Ravensburger who helped sponsor this video. Some people get intimidated when they have to draw in a game, but here the lines are already drawn for you. You just have to pick which ones to follow and you'll have plenty of options. Will that make your art any better? Only one way to find out. Join me at the table and let's learn how to play. To set up, give each person one of these dry erase markers and a random double-sided scribble board. These each have different patterns and you can flip your board to either side. We'll assume we have four players in this video returning the leftover boards and markers back to the box. These are the prompt cards. On their face they have a white and black box each with a unique prompt. Decide as a group if you'd like to use the white or black boxes. The white boxes tend to be easier and they suggest using them for your first game, so we'll do that here. Either way you shuffle these cards into a face down pile or as I've done here I've split them into two piles. You'll also need something you can use to set a two-minute timer, so I'll just use my phone. And that's the setup. In Mind the Lines you and the other players will each receive a secret prompt you must try to draw on your boards using its dotted lines. When the timer runs out,

1:37 you'll secretly shuffle together everyone's prompts plus a few extra and then try to figure out which prompts go with each drawing. After four rounds you'll assess your efforts hoping to get a winning score as a group. The game is played over four rounds and each round is broken into two parts starting with scribbling. Here each person draws a prompt from the deck and secretly examines the one in the colored box the players agreed to use. So, white in this case. Let's pretend this was my card. That means sailboat is my prompt, and I make sure that no one else sees it. Once everyone is ready and knows their prompt, they put their cards face down in front of themselves, and then you start the 2-minute timer. Everyone now has 2 minutes to draw their prompt on their own scribble board following certain rules. First, you decide which of your board's four sides will be the bottom. As we know, my prompt is sailboat, and I think I'll have this be the bottom edge. Now you use your marker to draw along your board's dotted lines.

2:43 And you must follow the dotted lines, but you can start and stop anywhere you like. I'm following these dotted lines to try to draw something that looks kind of like a sail. But you can also pick up your marker and continue drawing somewhere else. Now I'm going to try to create what might look like the bottom of a sailboat, and then I might try to create the appearance of water by connecting these dots like that. You can be very creative with your lines. You might even find ways to draw symbols like arrows or icons, but you cannot create scribbles that form letters or numbers. I could not, for example, try to spell out the word boat like I've done here. But you can, when you're drawing, erase any lines you don't like using the back of your pen, or as I'm doing here, just using a Kleenex. But remember, the timer is going. So, you'll want to use your time wisely. Now, if you finish early, just stop and wait for everyone else to finish. And when the timer runs out, everyone must stop drawing. If everyone is done early, that's okay, too. Either way, all the players now display their drawings so everyone can see them. To make sure it's clear which side of your board is the bottom, place your marker along that edge. Then it's time for the second part of the round, pairing. Have someone collect all of the face-down prompts and then add that same number of new prompts

4:14 to them from the decks, so four in this case. Without looking at any of them, they're shuffled together and then flipped face up on the table where everyone can see them. This means four of these prompts are the ones we used to create our scribbles, but four of them are not. So, as players, we now want to eliminate the four incorrect prompts, leaving just the ones we started the round with. To do this, players will take turns in clockwise order around the table, starting with the person who last looked at a piece of art. Or you can just choose someone randomly. On your turn, you'll pick any one of the prompts to eliminate by turning it face down. But, you may not talk to the other players about why you're making your choice, and the other players cannot give you hints or suggestions. Because during this part of the round, players are not meant to be communicating or giving signals to each other. So, if you see a player eliminate your prompt, make sure you don't let anyone know. Just keep a calm face and carry on. If we assume it was this player's turn to eliminate a prompt and they had drawn a hot air balloon, they might choose to eliminate Ferris wheel, concerned that players might think that's what they were trying to draw. So, this might be the prompt they would flip over.

5:30 Hopefully, that wasn't someone else's prompt. Once each of the players have chosen one prompt to eliminate, you'll have as many face-up prompts as the number of players. So, in this case, four. Everyone now looks to see if their prompt is still face-up on the table, And if so, those players collect those prompts to put beside their scribble board. Any face-up cards that were not collected are now put off to the side into what is known as a penalty stack. In this case, we earned one penalty this round because this player's prompt was incorrectly eliminated. Their prompt had been computer. Now you gather all of the cards that were used that round, except for any that went into the penalty stack, and you return those prompts back to the box. Every player now wipes their scribble board clean, and then you pass your board clockwise, or you can just have everyone flip their own boards over. Either way, you end each round so that you have a new board or new board side to use for the next round. And then it's time to start the next round, which works just like the first one. And you'll continue playing rounds until you finished a total of four. Then count how many cards ended up in your penalty stack. If there are the same number or fewer than the number of players, you win. So in a four-player game, we would need four or fewer. If you had played using the more challenging black box prompts, then you win if you have as

7:02 many penalties or less than twice the number of players. So in our four-player game, we would need to have eight or fewer penalties to win. Just keep in mind, the game can end early if you've already gained more penalty cards than are allowed for your number of players. So, the goal of the game is to play four rounds and not lose at that point or at any point before that. And I should mention, if you have two or three players, there are a couple of adjustments to the rules of the game. First, each person will still only get one scribble board, but during a round, they each take two prompts to draw on it. And you are not allowed to draw lines or provide hints about which of your drawings belong to which of your prompts. In a two-player game, when the pairing part of the round begins, shuffle in four additional cards with the four prompts that players had drawn.

7:56 In a three-player game, you would shuffle in six additional prompts along with the ones that the players drew from. Either way, whether you have two or three players, when guessing, take turns around and around the table turning over one prompt card each time until everyone has turned over two cards each. Otherwise, the rules remain the same. And that's everything you need to know to play Mind the Lines. If you have any questions about anything you saw here, feel free to put them in the comments below and I'll gladly answer them as soon as I get a chance. You'll also find forums for discussion, pictures, other videos, and lots more over on the game's page at BoardGameGeek and I'll put a link to that in the description below. And if you found this video helpful, please consider giving it a like, subscribing, and clicking that little bell icon so you get notification anytime we post a new video. And if you'd like to support the channel directly, you can join the Patreon team, which I'll have linked below. But, until next time, thanks for watching.