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1–16 players · no sign-up

Drawing Battle

Everybody gets the same shape to draw and nobody gets to see it — you are given the name and nothing else. When the timer runs out, every drawing is measured against the real shape and laid straight over the top of your lines, so the score comes with the reason.

  1. Everyone is given the same shape — the name of it, never the picture.
  2. You have 60 seconds by default, anywhere from 30 to 180.
  3. The server scores every drawing out of 100 and ranks them.
  4. Then the real shape goes over your lines, coloured by how far off you were.

You get a link. Send it to your friends and press start.

Nobody around to play with?

Drop into a room where people are already waiting. No link needed.

Try a round on your own

No room, no link, nobody else. Pick how hard you want it, draw the shape from its name, and see the same score you would get in a battle.

How to play

  1. Open a room and send the link

    One button. No account, no download, nothing for anyone else to install. Everyone who opens the link picks a nickname and lands in the same room — one player works, sixteen is the ceiling, and the host sets the number of rounds and the seconds on the clock. There is a public-room button too, if there is nobody around.

  2. Draw the shape you cannot see

    Every round names one shape and shows you nothing else. That is the whole point: put the picture on screen and the game becomes tracing, which nobody has to be good at. You draw it the way you remember it, and everyone in the room is drawing the same thing at the same time.

  3. Get scored, and get shown why

    When the clock stops, the server lines your drawing up with the real shape — same position, same size, so only the form counts — and works out how much of the shape you caught and how much of your ink landed on it. Those two numbers become one score out of 100, and the shape is drawn over your lines in green, amber and red.

Not seeing the shape is the game

Show somebody the picture and ask them to draw it, and you have made a tracing exercise — the person who wins is whoever is most patient with their wrist. Give them the word bicycle and thirty seconds, and you find out something much funnier: almost nobody knows where the frame goes, and everybody is certain they do. That gap between what you think you remember and what you actually put on the page is the whole entertainment, and it only exists while the reference is hidden.

So the room sends you a name and nothing else. The shape is not on your device, it is not faintly behind the canvas, and it does not appear a second early if you have a fast connection. It arrives when the round is over, and it arrives on top of your drawing.

A score you can argue with

Most drawing scores are a single mysterious percentage. This one is two things you can check by eye. How much of the shape did your lines cover, and how much of your ink was actually on the shape? Miss the cat’s tail and the first number drops. Scribble over the whole page and the second one collapses. You need both, which is why the final number is their harmonic mean rather than an average — one bad half drags the score down instead of being papered over by the good half.

Before the comparison happens, your drawing is slid and scaled onto the shape, keeping its proportions. You drew from a word, so of course it is not in the same place or the same size; penalising that would be measuring your aim rather than your memory. What survives the alignment is the form — and the form is the thing you were asked for.

Every score carries a version

Scoring is the kind of feature people quote back at you. “I got 90 yesterday and 85 today” is a bug report, even when the drawing was different. So every score here is stamped with the version of the engine that produced it, a room freezes that version the second it starts, and the version is printed on any image you save. If the maths ever changes, old scores keep the old version and stay reproducible instead of quietly drifting.

The shapes are ours. Every one was drawn from scratch as a set of coordinates for this site — nothing traced from a photograph, nothing lifted from a stock library, nothing generated. That is partly a copyright decision and partly a technical one: because we know where the lines are, the score is measurement rather than a guess.

If you would rather practise with the shape in front of you, trace and compare is the same comparison with the outline visible. Doodle Dash is the timed solo one where nothing judges your lines at all, and things to draw is a good place to steal a starting point.

Same family as Quick, Draw! and drawbattle.io — a shape, a clock, and something at the end telling you how you did.

Questions people ask

How is the score worked out?
Two measurements, not one. The first asks how much of the real shape your lines covered — did you get the whole outline, or forget the handle on the mug? The second asks how much of what you drew actually landed on the shape — a page of scribble covers everything, but almost none of it is in the right place. The two are combined into a single number out of 100, so neither shortcut works: you cannot win by filling the page, and you cannot win by drawing one careful line and stopping.
Is there any AI judging my drawing?
No, and that is deliberate. Nothing here is guessing what you drew — we know exactly where every line of the shape is, because we drew those shapes ourselves, so the comparison is geometry rather than an opinion. It means the score is the same every time for the same drawing, it works identically in every language, and there is no model to download before you can play.
Can I cheat by looking the shape up?
You could go and find a picture of a cat, the same as you could in any drawing game. What you cannot do is change your score: it is worked out on the server from the lines you actually sent, and nothing your browser says about points is read at all. Everyone in the room is scored by the same code with the same settings, so the ranking is honest even if somebody is peeking.
Why did my score change between games?
Scores carry a version number — this one is engine v1, and you will see it in the lobby and printed on any image you save. A room locks its version the moment it starts, so a scoring change can never move the numbers in a game already in progress. If the version on two scores is different, they were produced by different maths and are not meant to be compared.
How many shapes are there?
15 at the moment, split into easy, medium and hard, and the list grows. Every one of them was drawn from scratch for this site — no traced photographs, no stock art, no AI output — and each carries its name in all 17 of the languages the site runs in, so the prompt reads properly whoever is in the room. A room never asks for the same shape twice.
Do we need accounts or an app?
No. You open a room, you get a link, and anyone who opens that link is in. There is no sign-up, no email and nothing to install — it runs in the browser on a phone, a tablet with a pen, or a laptop with a mouse. You can also play a round on your own right on this page.
What if somebody loses connection halfway through?
Their seat stays in the room and the round keeps going without waiting for them. Half-finished drawings live on the server, so coming back drops you straight onto your own canvas with your lines still on it — and whatever you had drawn when the clock stopped is scored, whether or not you pressed the button.
Is this the same as drawbattle.io?
No — the names are close but the games are not. drawbattle.io is a head-to-head and team drawing game. This one is not about beating one opponent: everyone draws the same shape at once and the score comes from how closely the lines match it, which is closer in spirit to Quick, Draw! than to a versus match.

While you wait for everyone

Something to draw in the meantime.

Quick, Draw! is a trademark of Google LLC. drawbattle.io is operated by its respective owner. drawmates is not affiliated with either.