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Sketchy

Everyone writes a secret word, then the sketchbooks go round the table: draw what you read, guess what you see, pass it on. When the books come home, open them page by page and find out how a penguin became a tuxedo.

3–10 players · 15–30 minutes · free · no account

Play Sketchy

How it works

One person opens kutuverse.com and creates a room. Everyone else joins by scanning the QR code or opening the link, on a phone, a tablet or a laptop, whatever they already have. Nobody makes an account, nobody downloads anything, and the game runs directly between your devices rather than on a company's server.

Short of players? Add computer players to fill the table, or play the whole thing on one device and pass it round.

How to play Sketchy

The telephone game, with pictures. Nobody wins by drawing well: the fun is in how far a word travels.

Pick a word. Everyone chooses a secret word for their own book, from three on offer or one of their own.

Draw. The book is passed on and the next player draws what the page says. No letters, no numbers. When the clock runs out, the page goes as it is.

Tools. Pen, eraser, lines, rectangles and ellipses (outlined or filled), a paint bucket, five pen sizes, see-through ink, and undo and redo as far back as you like. Hold Shift for straight lines, squares and circles. On a keyboard: B pen, E eraser, L line, F bucket, R rectangle, O ellipse (with Shift for filled), [ and ] for the pen size, Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y.

Guess. The next player sees only the drawing and writes what they think it is. Never leave it blank.

Round and round. Drawing and guessing take turns until every book is back with its owner. Everyone works at the same time.

The big reveal. The books are opened one at a time. The owner turns the pages for everyone.

Points. Guesses that land: a guess that matches the word, or what its drawing was of, is a point for the guesser and a point for the artist; the owner can overrule the spelling check. Owner's favourites: each owner gives a point to one sketch and one guess. The owner scores too when the last guess is the word.

The narrator. Switch on the spoken narrator in Settings → Access and your device reads the reveal out: every answer as its page turns, what each word came back as, whether it made it home, and who won.

Computer players cannot read drawings, so they doodle and guess with total confidence. They are where the best chains go wrong.

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