Play Anticipation Online

Anticipation came out for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988, developed by Rare and published by Nintendo. It was one of those oddball party games that showed up on the console, a digital board game that felt more like a living room activity than a typical action or adventure title. In an era dominated by platformers and RPGs, it was a simple, social alternative you could play with friends.

You control a colored token, moving it around a board by rolling a virtual die. The main objective is to reach the finish line first, but to move you must correctly guess what another player is drawing, one dot at a time, on a grid. The signature mechanics are the turn based guessing, the slow, deliberate reveal of the dot based drawing, and the race to shout out the answer before anyone else. The pacing is entirely dependent on the players; it can be painfully slow if someone is a bad artist, or frantic if everyone knows the answer. It feels like trying to decipher a secret code while your friends are yelling over your shoulder.