It turns out much fun can be had by co-opting the cards that come with pictionary for your own games. After a standard game in which Gary and I frankly obliterated Karl and Laura we decided to find some other uses for those little cards that tell you what to draw.
Charades has always been one of our most hilarity-inducing games, so we set about miming as many things from a single card as we could in a minute. Each card has ten things listed on it but the closest any of us got to that was eight, when I got a particularly easy set of things to mime. The worst any of us did was when I had decided to mime the things in the order they appeared on the card rather than skipping the hard ones. It turns out 60 seconds is not long enough to mime "boy scout", so I got a big fat zero.
Having exhausted ourselves laughing at a you-had-to-be-there comment from Karl, no-one wanted to stand up to mime. So we switched to password, where you have to describe the word you’re given without using the word itself. That proved easier than miming and we all managed to get through all ten words on a card in the time limit a few times, despite some deliberate screwing around ("In the old days they used to raise the corner of the vendor’s tent in order to clutch at the sweet fruit inside" for "shop-lifter").
It’s endless, turnless, rule-less, senseless games like this that always end up keeping me up until three or four o’clock in the morning. Yawn.