Draw-a-Phone
Telephone, but everyone's a terrible artist.
This is the classic telephone-and-sketchbook party format, run entirely on shared screens instead of paper being passed hand to hand. A sentence you wrote gets drawn by someone else, then re-described by a third person from only that drawing, and the fun is watching a coherent idea slowly fall apart into nonsense. When the last chain is revealed, you can save every story as a comic-strip image or keep any drawing as a sticker.
Objective
Write a starting sentence, then watch it warp as it travels around the table: drawn, guessed, drawn, guessed, drawn…
How to play
- Phase 1: every player writes a short starting sentence. The chains are formed and each one begins in front of its author.
- Phase 2: each round, every chain moves one seat over. The player who receives a text draws it; the player who receives a drawing writes a one-line guess of what it shows. The loop continues until each chain has visited every player once.
- Phase 3: Showtime! After the last round the host reveals every story step by step. Then everyone picks Best drawing, Funniest line and Wildest story.
Scoring
Nobody scores while the chains travel. After Showtime, everyone picks Best drawing (+1 point to its artist), Funniest line (+1 to its writer) and Wildest story (a trophy, no points). Ties all score. The real payoff is watching each idea drift and collapse.
Example round
- Ben writes the starting sentence: 'A penguin ordering a pizza on the phone.'
- Cleo receives the text and draws a rough waddling bird holding a slice-shaped speech bubble.
- Dan gets only the drawing and writes his best guess: 'A bird throwing a piece of cheese.'
- Ana receives Dan's sentence and draws a bird mid-throw with a triangle labeled 'cheese?' floating nearby.
- When the full chain is revealed end to end, everyone sees the penguin became an anonymous cheese-throwing bird within two hops, and the room votes Cleo's drawing the funniest of the round.
Strategy tips
- Write starting sentences with one clear, drawable action rather than a scene with several details — the more you cram in, the faster it gets simplified away.
- When drawing, sketch the single most literal interpretation instead of a clever one — cleverness is exactly what causes the next player to guess wrong.
- When guessing from a drawing, describe only what's actually on the canvas, not what you assume the artist meant, since your sentence becomes the next drawer's only source material.
- A chain drifts the most when someone tries to save it — over-explaining a bad drawing usually derails the next guess further than just describing what you see.
Best with
Works with two players too: the Muse whispers a starting line to each of the two chains, you both draw and guess at once, then judge together whether each idea survived. It gets funnier as the group grows, since more hops means more mutation by the time each chain comes back around — a solid fit for a full table or a video call with everyone's camera on for the reveal.
Variations
- Agree to vote for the funniest drawing and the funniest starting sentence at the reveal, since the game supports an optional vote but doesn't require one.
- For a spicier round, agree that starting sentences must reference something that actually happened in the room that day.
- Cap drawing time verbally (say, 45 seconds) if your group tends to over-invest in art quality and slow the game down.
FAQ
Does everyone see the same chain, or different chains at once?
Every player's starting sentence begins its own chain, and all chains move around the table together each round, so several chains are being drawn and guessed in parallel before every chain is revealed at the end.
Do drawings score higher than guesses, or is it just for laughs?
Only the final vote scores: the authors of the funniest drawing and the funniest sentence get 1 point each. The chains themselves score nothing — the reveal is the payoff.
What if I can't draw at all?
That's part of the format — a bad drawing is often what makes a chain funnier, and the next player only has to guess what they see, not judge your art.