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3–12 players · no sign-up

Drawing Telephone

One sentence, drawn by the next player, described by the player after that — and so on around the table. Nobody ends up anywhere near where they started, which is the entire point.

  1. Everyone writes an opening sentence at the same time.
  2. Your sentence goes to the next player, who has to draw it.
  3. The drawing goes to the player after that, who writes what they see.
  4. When the chain has been all the way round, every version is replayed one panel at a time.

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.

How to play

  1. Open a room and send the link

    One button. No account, no download, no app to install on anyone else’s phone. Everyone who opens the link picks a nickname and lands in the same room — three players is enough, twelve is the ceiling.

  2. Everybody plays at the same time

    This is not a game where eleven people watch one person draw. Every player has their own chain going, and every round moves all of them forward at once, so nobody is ever sitting there waiting for a turn.

  3. Watch the chains fall apart

    At the end every chain is replayed panel by panel: the sentence, what somebody drew, what the next person thought that drawing was. Save any chain as a single image and put it in the group chat.

Why the drawing version is funnier than the whispered one

In the spoken game a sentence degrades slowly: a word gets misheard, then another, and after six people you have a slightly different sentence. Putting a drawing in between every step changes the failure mode completely. A drawing forces whoever made it to commit to one reading of the sentence, and it throws away everything the sentence did not say — so the next player is not misremembering, they are honestly describing something that genuinely looks like a cat holding a briefcase.

That is also why drawing skill barely matters. The chain breaks hardest when someone draws exactly what they meant and the next person reads it perfectly reasonably as something else. Groups where nobody can draw tend to produce the best results.

Everyone plays every round

The version of this game most people have played passes one sheet of paper around, which means you spend most of the evening watching. Here every player has their own chain in flight: in round one everyone writes, in round two everyone draws somebody else’s sentence, in round three everyone describes a drawing they have just been handed. With eight people there are eight chains going at once and eight endings to read at the end, and the game takes about as long as it takes with three.

Each round has a timer, which sounds stressful and is actually the kindest part of the design: it means the game cannot stall because somebody is agonising over the perfect drawing, or has put their phone down to answer the door. If a player drops out entirely the round moves on without them, and their seat is still there when they come back.

Stuck for a first sentence?

There is a Random button on the first round that builds one out of the same hand-written word lists our other tools use. If you would rather browse ideas yourself, thethings to draw list and thedrawing prompt generator are both a good place to steal from — and Doodle Dash is there for when there is nobody around to play with.

Questions people ask

What is Drawing Telephone?
Drawing Telephone is the drawing version of the party game where a whispered sentence goes round a circle and comes out mangled. Someone writes a sentence, the next player draws it, the player after that writes what they think the drawing shows, and it keeps alternating until the chain gets back round. At the end everyone sees every chain replayed from the beginning.
How many people do I need?
Three at the very least — the chain has to change hands enough times to go wrong. It works best with five to eight, and 12 is the maximum in one room. Everyone draws every round, so a bigger group does not mean a slower game.
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, no download, and nothing to install — it runs in the browser on a phone, a tablet with a pen, or a laptop with a mouse.
What if somebody loses connection halfway through?
Their seat stays in the room and the game keeps going without waiting for them. When they come back, they are dropped straight into whatever round is running, with their half-finished drawing still on the canvas. Rounds also have a timer, so one person walking away never freezes everybody else.
Can I draw badly?
Yes. Drawing badly is the mechanism. A perfectly clear drawing gets described correctly and the chain survives, which is the boring outcome — the funny ones come from a shape that was meant to be a lighthouse and gets written down as a very tall cat.
Can I save what we made?
Any chain can be saved as one image with all its panels in order, put together inside your own browser tab. Nothing you draw is uploaded to be turned into a picture somewhere else.

While you wait for everyone

Something to draw in the meantime.