The free drawing guessing game Draw & Guess

How to play Draw & Guess

Draw & Guess has two modes. Draw & guess is the team game: one person draws, their team guesses out loud. Drawing telephone is a pass-the-phone chain with no teams at all. Here's how the team game works.

1. 1Split into 2, 3 or 4 teams and pick a word list: Easy, Medium, Hard, Kids or Mixed.
2. 2Set the turn length to 60, 90 or 120 seconds.
3. 3The first drawer takes the phone and reads the word without letting their team see it.
4. 4Draw it on the screen with your finger. You get four colors, an eraser, undo and a clear button.
5. 5Your team shouts guesses. When someone says the word, tap Got it and a new word appears. Stuck? Tap Pass.
6. 6When time runs out, hand the phone to the next team's drawer. The scoreboard keeps the totals.

Rotate drawers so everyone gets a turn. Play until each person has drawn at least once, or until one team pulls clearly ahead.

Word lists

Pick the list that fits your group: Easy, Medium, Hard or Kids, or Mixed to pull from all of them. Every word is family-friendly and drawable, even if some take more creativity than others. In drawing telephone, the first player can write their own phrase or take a random one.

How drawing telephone works

Drawing telephone, also called the draw and pass game, has no teams and no score. It's about what happens to a sentence after it passes through a few people's drawings. You need 3 to 10 players and one phone.

Player 1 writes a short phrase, or takes a random one from the app. Player 2 sees only that phrase and draws it. Player 3 sees only the drawing and writes what they think it shows. Player 4 draws that new phrase, and so on, writing and drawing in turns until everyone has played.

Then comes the best part. The whole chain is revealed step by step, from the first phrase to the last guess, so the room can watch “a cat learning to ride a bike” slowly become “a tiger at the gym.” If a drawing deserves to live forever, save it to the device.

Tips for better drawings

• Start with the shape that matters most. A giraffe is a long neck first; the spots can wait.
• Draw the setting when the thing itself is hard. A tiny boat is easier to guess with waves under it.
• Use color as a clue: green for grass, blue for water, red for anything hot.
• Skip the details. A quick stick figure beats a slow portrait every time.
• Agree on house rules first. Most groups ban letters, numbers and talking from the drawer, but pointing at your drawing is fair.
• In telephone mode, write phrases that are clear but a little odd. “A dog reading the newspaper” goes further than “a dog.”
• Turn the brightness up so the whole team can see the screen.

Ways to play

Where Draw & Guess works best

It's made for a room full of people sharing one phone: birthday parties, sleepovers, holiday afternoons when everyone has eaten too much to move.

In a classroom, the team mode doubles as a vocabulary game. Split the class into four teams and let one student draw at a time while their team guesses. The Easy and Kids lists work well for younger grades.

For family game night, drawing telephone is a great equalizer. A six-year-old's rocket ship is just as likely to send the chain somewhere strange as a teenager's careful sketch, and nobody needs to be good at drawing to have fun.

Where drawing games come from

Guessing a word from a drawing is a close cousin of charades: same idea, with a pencil instead of acting. The board game Pictionary, first published in 1985, put the team version in a box.

Drawing telephone mixes that idea with an even older game, telephone, where a whispered message changes as it travels down a line of people. Groups played the paper version by folding a sheet so each person saw only the step before theirs, and the first online version launched in 2007.

Draw & Guess is our own free take on both classics, with its own word lists. It isn't connected to any board game or app. It runs in your browser on one phone, with no download and no account.

Questions