How to Play

Draw, guess, score points - jump into any room and you'll be playing within seconds.

Each game is 10 rounds. Every round, one person gets a secret word to draw, and everyone else races to guess it - the faster you guess, the more it's worth. Once all 10 rounds are done, whoever scored the most wins, and a new game starts right after.

🔄 The basics

• Each game runs for 10 rounds, with the turn to draw rotating through everyone in the room.
• Whoever's drawing gets a word and 60 seconds to sketch it out - no letters or writing of any kind allowed on the canvas (numbers are a bit more nuanced - see below).
• Everyone else types guesses. Correct guesses are never shown to other players, so nobody can copy an answer they see in chat.
• As the artist, you'll see guesses coming in as they happen. Once someone's got it, a Done button appears if you'd rather lock the round in right there instead of waiting out the clock - or hit Skip at any point if you want to give up on the word entirely.

⏱️ How a round ends

Whichever of these happens first:

• Time runs out.
• The artist locks it in with Done, or gives up with Skip.
• The artist doesn't draw anything within the first 20 seconds.
• About 20 seconds pass after the first correct guess, giving everyone else a last window to guess before it moves on.
• Enough of the room votes to skip an artist who's stalling or not playing properly.
• An admin steps in and skips the round.

🏆 Scoring

Guessing correctly earns points based on how quickly you got there - the first correct guess earns the most, with each guess after that worth a little less, down to a floor of 5 points.

The artist earns points too - 10 for the first correct guess, plus 1 for every additional guesser beyond that (up to 5 extra), for a total earning potential of 15 points in a round. Nobody guessing at all means no points for the artist that round.

💡 Hints

Stuck as the artist? You can give up to 3 hints during a round:

• 1st hint reveals how many letters are in the word.
• 2nd hint reveals the first letter.
• 3rd hint reveals the second letter too.

Hints help your guessers, but each one costs you 2 points off your own total for the round - so it's a real trade-off, not a free out.

🎨 What you can draw with

• The "sounds like" ear. Draw a little ear somewhere in your sketch to signal "this bit sounds like the answer" - the classic example is an ear plus a box for the word "fox."
• Everyday symbols. Normal math, grammar, and currency symbols are fair game - "x + y = z" is a legitimate way to draw "equation." Chemical symbols aren't allowed, since they're almost always just the word in disguise (there's no real difference between drawing "Na" and just writing the word "sodium").
• Numbers, used honestly. Fine when they're standing in for a number-word ("2" for "to" or "two"), including a number that's already part of the word itself, and Roman numerals are OK too. Not fine: using numbers as letter substitutes, like writing "533" for "see" - that's letters wearing a disguise.
• Splitting into syllables. You can break a longer word into parts and draw each one separately - just don't try to represent a single-letter part that way. Skip it and let the rest carry the idea.
• Punctuation. Draw it freely - it doesn't require using the Hint button first.

🚫 What's off-limits

• Letters or words - obviously. But this goes further than literally writing something out: you also can't use a symbol, icon, or color to stand in for one specific letter. An apple for "A," an eye for "I," picking a color because it happens to start with the right letter - these are all the same violation wearing a costume.
• "Mapping" to a different word - pointing at part of an unrelated word to sneakily spell out the real one isn't allowed either.
• Giving away the word's length yourself. That's exactly what the Hint button is for. Drawing blanks or dashes on the canvas to show how many letters are in the word, without actually using a hint, is a letter-count hint you didn't earn.

💬 Chat conduct

Already guessed correctly? You're welcome to keep chatting - just don't help the rest of the room get there. Don't type the word out with gaps between the letters, and don't drop a leading clue, like naming the actor when the word's a movie title. If someone's misspelled their guess, it's fine to point that out - just don't give them the correct spelling.

🚩 Keeping things fair

If you think the current artist is stalling, drawing something unrelated, or otherwise not playing properly, you can vote to skip them - if enough of the room agrees, the round ends early, and nobody's points from that round count, even guessers who'd already gotten it. That's deliberate: a vote-skip means the room suspected something wasn't right, not just that the round didn't go anyone's way.

Don't impersonate an admin, in your username or otherwise. Breaking these rules can get a round skipped, get you voted or removed from a room, and repeated or serious violations can mean losing access altogether.