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3–12 players · no sign-up

Exquisite Corpse

One creature, drawn by three people who never see each other’s work. You get the head, somebody else gets the body, somebody else gets the legs — and all anyone can see of the part above them is a few pixels of line poking past the fold.

  1. The sheet is split into a head, a body and a pair of legs.
  2. Everyone draws at the same time, each on a different sheet.
  3. You only see the last few pixels of the part above yours.
  4. At the end every creature is revealed from the head down.

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, nothing for anyone else to install. Everyone who opens the link picks a nickname and lands in the same room — three players is the minimum, twelve is the ceiling, and you can set the sheet to anywhere from two to six sections.

  2. Draw your part, and only your part

    Your canvas is one horizontal band of the sheet. Above it there is a fold, and just past the fold sit the line ends left by whoever drew the section before you. Carry them on — or deliberately do not — then leave your own ends in the shaded strip at the bottom for the next player.

  3. Watch the creatures come out

    Everybody draws every round, so a room of eight ends up with eight complete creatures. They are revealed one section at a time, head first, and any of them can be saved as a single image to put in the group chat.

The fold is the whole game

On paper, the trick is mechanical: you fold the sheet over what you drew and pull the last centimetre of each line past the crease so the next person has somewhere to start. They see three or four line ends and nothing else, and they have to decide what those ends were — antennae, ears, the top of a very long neck. Whatever they decide is wrong, and being wrong in a confident, fully-committed way is what makes the finished creature funny.

This version does the same thing literally. Your canvas is one band of the sheet with a dashed fold across the top, and sitting above that fold are the cropped ends of the previous drawing — in the right place, at the right angle, at the exact size they will be in the finished picture. The rest of that drawing is never sent to your device at all, so there is nothing to accidentally see and nothing to dig out of the page.

Everyone draws every round

Passing one sheet around a table means one person draws while everybody else waits. Here every player has their own sheet in flight: in the first round everyone draws a head, in the second everyone draws a body onto somebody else’s sheet, and so on. Eight players means eight creatures and eight endings to look at, and the game takes about as long as it does with three.

Each section has a timer, which sounds stressful and is actually the kindest part of the design: nothing stalls because one person is perfecting a knee. If somebody drops out entirely, their section is left blank and the sheet moves on — their seat is still there when they come back.

Where it came from

The surrealists played it in Paris in the 1920s, first with words and then with drawings, and named it after the sentence that came out of the first round. It has been rediscovered by every art class since, sometimes under the name consequences, and the French cadavre exquis is still the name most people search for outside English. It survives because it needs nothing: paper, a pen, and people willing to not look.

If there is nobody around right now, Doodle Dash is the solo one, and the things to draw list is a good place to steal a starting point. When the group turns up, Drawing Telephone is the other one where nobody can see what they are copying.

Same family as Gartic Phone and Telestrations — the sheet is handed on before it is finished, and nobody sees the whole thing until the end.

Questions people ask

What is Exquisite Corpse?
Exquisite Corpse is a drawing game the surrealists invented in Paris in the 1920s. A sheet of paper is folded into sections, each person draws in one section without seeing the others, and only the ends of their lines are left showing past the fold for the next person to continue from. When the paper is unfolded you get one creature made of parts that were never meant to go together. The French name, cadavre exquis, comes from the first sentence the group produced when they played the same game with words.
How many people do I need?
Three is the minimum, because three sections — head, body, legs — is the classic form. It works well up to 12 in one room, and since everybody draws on their own sheet every round, twelve players means twelve finished creatures rather than a longer wait.
Can I really not see the other parts?
Only the fold. The server crops what came before down to a strip a few pixels tall and sends nothing else, so there is no hidden layer to dig out of the page — the part above yours genuinely does not exist on your device until the reveal.
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.
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 section is running, with their half-finished drawing still on the canvas. Every section also has a timer, so one person walking away never freezes everybody else.
Can I save what we made?
Any finished creature can be saved as one image, with the sections stacked in order and a line saying who drew what. It is put together inside your own browser tab — nothing you draw is uploaded to be turned into a picture somewhere else.
How is this different from Gartic Phone?
In Gartic Phone a whole drawing is passed on and rewritten as a sentence. Here one drawing is built in sections: you get a sliver of what the last person drew, you carry those lines on, and the finished figure only appears once the sheet has been all the way round. Rooms open from a link with no account, and there is a public-room button if nobody is about.

While you wait for everyone

Something to draw in the meantime.

Gartic Phone and Telestrations are trademarks of their respective owners. drawmates is not affiliated with them.