Scoring

How chain is scored

You are scored on the word at the beginning, after the drawing has been through everybody.

The five points

Each chain is worth 5.00, on the same split as the other games: 72% for naming the original word, 28% for how quickly you commit. Playing alone, you are every link — draw the word, glance at what you drew, redraw that — and at the end you have to name where you started.

In a room, the maximum comes from the number of hands the chain passed through instead — one chain each, five points a link you can still recognise.

The part that isn't scored

A chain that turns a lighthouse into a cactus in four drawings scores nothing and is the reason to play. The scoreboard measures whether the idea survived; it has no opinion about whether the wreckage was worth it.

Why the number can be trusted

When you post a score, the round travels to the server, not the score. The server rebuilds the exact round from its seed — the same words, the same figures — marks it again itself, and stores the number it worked out. Claiming a perfect fifty with ten wrong answers stores a zero.

The one thing the server cannot see is your clock, because only your browser watched it. So the timer reading is clamped to the range it could possibly have been in: a forged clock can buy the speed bonus and never the point itself.