LOL Hands-On

Plenty of DS games may have forced you to display your artistic skill with a stylus, but few have relied so heavily on your imagination as Agetec's upcoming LOL. This party game has you and up to three friends creating a series of word and picture challenges for one another, which you can then vote on to determine the winner. There are no preset guidelines or artistic templates to draw inspiration from, just instructions from the leader of the round and a canvas on which to submit your answer. It sounds fairly simple--which it absolutely is--but after a few rounds we noticed some potential for creative tomfoolery.

As you might expect from a handheld party game, LOL requires only one card to start up a match--the rest of your group can use the DS Download Play feature. Once these hangers-on have downloaded the game, the host then creates the first challenge. The palette of options is fairly limited for the player providing directions. In fact, the only real choice is the time limit. Beyond that, you'll simply use the stylus to scrawl whichever challenge you can think of to begin the round. For example, in one of the rounds we played the host commanded us to draw "the greatest werewolf of all time." The images submitted ranged from crudely drawn pictures of Michael J. Fox's character in Teen Wolf to a posttransformation Michael Jackson in "Thriller." Reducing the time limit makes for more frantic artwork, but it also helps maintain a snappy pace for your get-together.

Of course, the directions don't necessarily need to be artistic in nature--it's all up to the leader. He or she might ask you to draw a picture, write a phrase, or even answer a math equation. Some of the other directions from our game included writing our favorite word and drawing our favorite Nintendo character. No matter what the directions are, a great sense of humor is critical if you want to have a good time with LOL.

After each answer has been submitted, you vote for a winner. In our game, we each held three votes. We could vote on our own entry, someone else's, or take the diplomatic route by divvying up votes among each answer. The winner becomes the leader of the next round. As the leader, this person begins the cycle anew by brainstorming another command for everyone.

There's not much more to LOL than that. Its blank-slate nature makes it one of the more minimalist games you're likely to find on the DS, rivaling the simplicity of Pictochat--or even just a blank sheet of paper. If you feel as though your imagination is up to the task, you can find LOL in stores next month at a retail price of $20.