Custom Word Packs: A Complete Guide

The default word bank holds 2,035 words across 15 categories. It is well balanced, translated into nine languages, and completely impersonal — which is exactly right for a public room and exactly wrong for the fourth game night with the same five friends.

Custom word packs are the fix, and they are the one feature no boxed edition of a drawing game can offer. But most first attempts play badly, in predictable ways. This guide covers how to build one that works.

How to Load One

Custom packs are available when you host a private room:

• Click Create room on the homepage — this opens a private room with a code and invite link.
• Open the room settings and find the custom word list field.
• Paste your list. Commas or one word per line both work; extra spaces and blank lines are ignored.
• Set your round count (1–6), then share the invite link and start.

The room draws from your list instead of the default bank. Note that custom words are not translated — everyone sees exactly what you typed, so a pack written in English will be an English pack for all players regardless of their interface language.

How Long Should the List Be?

The arithmetic is straightforward. Every turn consumes one word, and each player takes one turn per round:

• 4 players, 3 rounds = 12 turns
• 6 players, 4 rounds = 24 turns
• 8 players, 5 rounds = 40 turns

A drawer is also shown three options to choose from, so the pack drains faster than turn count alone suggests. Aim for at least three times your expected turn count — roughly 40 words for a typical 6-player match, and 60–80 if you want to play two matches without repeats.

Below about 25 words, repetition becomes obvious and the pack stops feeling special. Above 100, you are doing more work than the occasion requires.

The Difficulty Mix

This is where most packs fail. The person writing the list picks their favourite ideas, which skew clever and hard, and the resulting match has a scoreboard full of zeros.

It matters more than it seems, because a drawer earns 40 points per person who solves the word. An unguessable prompt scores nothing for anybody in the room — not just for the guessers. Four scoreless rounds in a row and the group goes quiet.

A tested distribution for a 40-word pack:

• 24 easy-to-medium concrete nouns (60%) — the backbone. Things with a silhouette.
• 10 medium prompts (25%) — recognisable but needing a specific angle or detail.
• 6 hard or abstract (15%) — the memorable disasters. Rationed deliberately.

The hard prompts are what people talk about afterwards, which is exactly why they should be rare. Six across a whole match means each one lands as an event rather than as another round nobody solved.

Writing Prompts That Are Drawable

• Anchor to one concrete noun. “Existential dread” gives the drawer nothing. “Cat contemplating existential dread” gives them a cat. Abstraction should modify an object, not replace it.
• Two elements maximum. Every additional clause roughly halves the solve rate, because 80 seconds does not stretch.
• Keep it short to type. Guessers must produce the exact string. A long phrase with several plausible wordings will not be hit by anyone.
• Avoid near-duplicates. If your pack has both “dog” and “puppy”, guessers will type the wrong one and lose the speed bonus through no fault of their own.
• Check every prompt has a first stroke. If you cannot picture how you would begin drawing it, nobody else can either.

Five Pack Ideas That Work

• Inside jokes. The highest-reward option. Shared experiences, running gags, places your group has been. Unbeatable when everyone is in on it — and actively exclusionary when one person is not, so check the guest list first.
• A single theme. Films, food, animals, mythology. Gives the night an identity and makes word choice feel coherent rather than random.
• Workplace vocabulary. Product names, team names, office landmarks. Doubles as painless onboarding — new joiners absorb the terminology by watching people draw it.
• Classroom vocabulary. Paste the current unit’s word list and revision becomes something students volunteer for.
• Nostalgia pack. Objects from a specific decade. Works especially well in mixed-age groups, where half the room knows a cassette tape on sight and the other half is reverse-engineering it.

Mistakes to Avoid

• All-abstract packs. They read as hilarious and play as a scoreless slog.
• Proper nouns nobody can draw. A person’s name is not a prompt unless they have one strongly visual trait.
• Too few words. Under 25 and repeats start in the second round.
• Crude entries. One laugh, then a room where somebody is uncomfortable. The cost is higher than the payoff, particularly with colleagues or family present.
• Mixed languages in one pack. Custom words are not translated, so a bilingual list will leave half the room unable to type an answer.
• Writing it during the call. Twenty minutes beforehand is plenty; twenty minutes while eight people wait is not.

Testing a Pack Before You Use It

A pack that reads well can still play badly, and you will only find out with eight people waiting. Two cheap checks catch most problems:

• The first-stroke test. Go through the list and, for each entry, decide what your opening stroke would be. Anything you stall on gets cut. This alone removes most unplayable prompts.
• The solo run. Take five entries into Solo Draw and actually draw them with no clock. Prompts that take you ninety seconds unhurried will be impossible in a live round.

Ten minutes of testing typically removes three or four entries and saves a visibly flat stretch in the middle of the match.

Reusing and Evolving a Pack

Good packs improve with use. After a session, note which prompts produced the best rounds and which fell flat, then keep the winners and replace the rest. Two or three iterations produces a list genuinely tuned to your group — the sort of thing worth saving permanently.

Some groups keep several: a short easy pack for when new people join, a hard one for regulars, and a themed one for occasions. Swapping packs is faster than writing a new one, and rotating them keeps the game from feeling repetitive without any additional effort.

A Fifteen-Minute Method

If you are building a pack from scratch, this sequence is reliable:

• Minutes 1–5: list 25 concrete nouns from your theme. Do not filter — quantity first.
• Minutes 6–10: add 10 prompts with a twist. One noun plus one modifier each.
• Minutes 11–13: add 5 hard or abstract ideas. Stop at five.
• Minutes 14–15: read through and cut anything you cannot picture a first stroke for. Cutting three or four is normal.

That yields roughly a 35–40 word pack in the right proportions. Save it somewhere — a good pack is reusable, and the second outing is usually better than the first because everyone already understands the theme.