Draw and Guess Game

How to play the draw and guess game

Draw & Guess Party is a drawing guessing game in the style of the classic pictionary party game, rebuilt so you can play it on your own in any browser. You join a room with three bots: Pixel, Scribbles and Doodlebot. Everyone takes a turn at drawing in each of the three rounds, and everyone else races to guess the word. The chat on the right fills up with guesses, jokes and "so close!" moments, just like an online draw-and-guess room, but you never have to wait for a lobby to fill.

1. Pick a bot difficulty, type a name if you like, and press Start the party!
2. When it is your turn to draw, choose one of three words. You have 60 seconds to draw it with your mouse or finger. Don't write letters: draw the thing.
3. Watch the chat. The bots shout out what they think they see. When your drawing is clear enough they will get it, and you earn points for every bot that guesses.
4. When a bot is drawing, a doodle appears stroke by stroke. The blanks at the top show how many letters the word has; a couple of letters are revealed as time runs down.
5. Type your guess and press Enter. Wrong guesses cost nothing, and if you are one letter away the game tells you you're close.
6. After three rounds (twelve turns) the podium shows who won, and you can look back at every drawing from the game.

Scoring

Speed matters for everyone. A correct guess is worth between 50 and 300 points depending on how much of the turn is left, and the first player to get the word gets a 50 point bonus. As the drawer you score 75 points for every player who guesses your word, plus 50 extra if all three get it. That means a good drawer can win the game just as easily as a fast guesser: a clear drawing that all three bots guess in the first ten seconds is worth more than most single guesses.

Tips to win

When you draw

• Draw the version everyone would draw. The bots learned from hundreds of thousands of doodles, so the classic shape wins: a house with a triangle roof, a sun with rays, a fish with a tail fin.
• Lead with the giveaway feature. Ears and whiskers for a cat, the long neck of a giraffe, the stripes of a zebra. Draw that first, the outline second.
• Use the whole board. Big, simple lines read better than tiny details. Skip shading and scribbles.
• Pick words you can draw fast. The word buttons are labelled easy, medium or tricky; an easy word drawn in five seconds beats a tricky one nobody guesses.
• Watch the wrong guesses. If the bots keep saying "cup" when you are drawing a bucket, add the handle or the water that makes the difference.

When you guess

• Count the blanks. Two-word answers like "hot air balloon" or "palm tree" narrow it down quickly.
• Guess early and often. There is no penalty for wrong answers, and the points drop every second.
• Go broad, then specific. Try "bird", then "duck", "owl" or "parrot". Common alternatives like "bike", "tv" or "burger" are accepted.
• Remember the doodles are quick. Each one was drawn by a real person in under 20 seconds, so expect the simplest, most iconic version of the thing.

Meet the bots

The other three players are honest-to-goodness bots, and they are labelled as bots everywhere in the game. When you draw, every bot looks at your picture through the same small neural network that powers ourQuick Draw game. The network gives a list of its most likely answers, and that is what the bots type in the chat, wrong ones first. A bot only types the right word once the AI is confident, and each bot has its own reaction time and personality: Pixel is quick, Scribbles is chatty but needs a clearer picture, and Doodlebot sits in the middle. Choose Easy bots if you want more time to guess their drawings and more chances to beat them, or Hard bots if you want them to read your sketches from just a few lines and draw faster on their own turns.

When a bot draws, it replays a real doodle made by a person for the open Quick, Draw! dataset, line by line, in the order it was originally drawn. That keeps every bot drawing human, sometimes brilliant and sometimes hilariously bad, and it means the other bots are guessing a real drawing too: they can be beaten.

A pictionary game online, with no waiting room

Draw-and-guess games have been a party favourite since long before the internet: one person sketches, everyone else shouts answers. Online versions such as the old "draw my thing" rooms made it possible to play with strangers, but they need enough players online at the same time and a word list that suits everyone. This game keeps the parts that make the genre fun (the chat, the ticking clock, the letter hints and the race to the podium) and replaces the lobby with bots that are always ready. It's a good way to practise quick, readable sketches before a game night, a relaxed solo game for a coffee break, or a classroom activity where children take turns at the board while the class guesses with the bots.

Want more? Flip the roles in Guess the Drawing, where you only guess, test how fast the AI can read your sketches in Speed Draw, or warm up with six words inQuick Draw.