Draw. The AI guesses. Bank the points. That is the whole game in 10 seconds — the rest is self-explanatory once you play.
These are the only buttons you need – the rest is self-explanatory.
Power-ups only affect other players, are limited per round and locked just before the round ends – so nobody can wreck everything in the last second.
The most useful tip is the one nobody expects.
Draw less, not more. The recogniser was trained on Google's Quick, Draw! dataset — and there, every round ended the moment an AI guessed the word. So the model has mostly seen barely recognisable scribbles and hardly any carefully finished pictures. Put in extra effort and add detail, and you will often be recognised worse than someone who throws down three rough strokes.
Start with the silhouette. The outline carries almost all of the information. A house is a rectangle with a triangle on top; a fish is an oval with a triangle at the back. Once the basic shape is there, add one or two features that pin the word down — whiskers on a cat, spokes on a wheel.
Draw big and centred. Your sketch is cropped and centred automatically before recognition, so where on the canvas you draw makes no difference. Large strokes are more precise than tiny ones, though — especially with a finger.
Watch the bars. They show you what the AI is currently betting on. If your word already appears in second or third place, you are usually one characteristic stroke away. If something completely unrelated is on top, starting over is often faster than patching up.
One reassurance: some words are nearly impossible to tell apart as quick sketches — snail and shell, cloud and sheep. When the AI keeps getting those wrong, it is not your fault.
What counts is not how beautifully you draw, but when the AI hits your word. The earlier in the round it becomes confident, the more points you get. A round lasts 30 seconds; if you are never recognised you score nothing, but you lose nothing either.
After each round you see every sketch side by side with its recognition score. Then you vote on which picture you liked best — a ranking that is independent of the AI and rewards exactly what the recogniser cannot see.
Solo — against 2 bots, starting immediately. The bots replay real drawings from the dataset stroke by stroke and go through the same recognition you do — so they can fail too.
Public — jump right in: you are matched with other players. Once four people are in the room, the round starts by itself. If players are missing, bots fill in so nobody is left waiting.
Private — open a room, invite friends: you get a code to share. The link works on phones as well — handy when you are in the same room or on a video call.
Optionally, the game interferes: confetti in front of the canvas, ants stealing your ink, mirrored controls, shaky strokes. A slider sets how often an effect strikes, from "Mild" to "Insane" — or switches them off entirely. Effects hit everyone equally and never change the scoring.
In public rooms you see strangers' drawings. If somebody draws something offensive, the round review offers a menu on every other player's tile with two options: Report sends us a report, and Hide replaces that person's drawings with a placeholder for the rest of your session.
Offensive content is not allowed and reports are reviewed. To reach us directly, use the contact page.
Do I need an account? No. Pick a nickname and play. There is no sign-up and no password.
Are my drawings stored? No. They live in the server's memory only while the game is running and are gone afterwards. Details in the privacy policy.
Does it work on a phone? Yes, in the browser and as an app. Drawing with a finger works well — rough shapes win more often than fine ones anyway.
How many people can play? Up to four per room.
How does the recognition actually work? A neural network processes your sketch as a small image. How it is built and trained is described in the making-of.