Drawing games

Which drawing game do you actually want?

There are three good free ones in a browser, and they are for different evenings. Here is the straight version.

You have friends and twenty minutes

Gartic Phone is the biggest of these and it is very good at exactly this: a lobby, a lot of people, an album at the end. skribbl.io is the other one — one person draws, everyone else races to type the word. If that's the evening you have, either will do it and neither needs an account.

Ours is chain: a word becomes a drawing, that drawing becomes somebody's guess, and the guess becomes the next drawing. Nobody sees more than one link back. It runs in a room online, and it also runs pass & play — one phone, passed around a table, no second device and no connection needed. That last part is the bit the others don't do.

You have ninety seconds and nobody

This is the gap. Gartic Phone and skribbl are built around a lobby, so alone they are quiet. Scrawl.gg has a daily: the same round for everybody on Earth, one attempt, a new one at your midnight. Four games, four dailies, and a run that counts the days you showed up.

That is the whole reason this site exists, and it is the one thing here that the other two don't have.

You want to know if you're any good

Nobody scores you in Gartic Phone — that is the point of it, and it is a fair choice. Here you are scored, and by something specific: a matcher that forgives spelling but never bends one real word into another, and in copy² a geometric comparison rather than an opinion. Every posted score is re-marked on the server from the round's seed, so the board is the game rather than a list of what people typed. How that works is written up here.

The short version

No account for any of them. Ours also works with no connection at all once it has loaded, which matters more on a train than it sounds.