Playing on a Phone: What the Screen Looks Like and How to Draw Well

Most groups end up mixed: a couple of laptops, several phones, maybe a tablet. The game runs in the phone's browser with nothing to install, and the layout rearranges itself into one column. The screenshots here were taken at a typical phone width during a two-player test game.

When you are guessing

• Read the top line first. “Guess (animal): _ _ _” tells you the category and the length. On a small screen it is easy to stare at the drawing and forget the blanks.
• The guess box stays usable with the keyboard open. While you type, the box sticks to the bottom edge of the screen so the on-screen keyboard does not hide it.
• Reactions are one tap. The rose, clap, slipper and poop buttons send a little animation to everyone — they do not count as guesses.

When you are drawing

The toolbar wraps onto two rows on a phone: the first has brush, eraser, fill and a few colors (plus a custom-color button); the second has more colors, then undo and clear. Everything you draw is sent as positions relative to the canvas, so a drawing made on a narrow phone appears at the same proportions on a wide laptop.

While your finger is on the canvas the page does not scroll or zoom, so you can draw near the edges without the screen jumping around. Outside the canvas, the page scrolls normally.

The one habit that matters: stay in the browser

Phones pause web pages that are in the background. If you lock the screen or switch to another app mid-game, the connection usually drops. What happens next depends on timing:

• You come back quickly. The page checks its connection as soon as it becomes visible again and reconnects with your score intact.
• It was your turn to draw. A drawer who disconnects ends their own turn immediately — the room moves on to the next player.
• You stay away past the end of the turn. You are taken out of the game, and opening the link again brings you back as a new player with zero points.

So: send the invite link before the game starts, keep the screen awake, and answer messages between games rather than during your turn.

Drawing tips that suit a small screen

• Draw big. Use most of the canvas. Small drawings on a phone come out as tiny scribbles on everyone else's screen.
• Outline first, details never. You have up to 80 seconds, and a finger is not precise. A house is a square, a triangle and a door — our test drawing above was guessed from exactly that.
• Use fill for large areas. One tap fills a closed shape, which is faster and neater than colouring in with a finger. Close the outline first, or the fill leaks.
• Undo beats the eraser. On a small screen the eraser is fiddly. If the last stroke went wrong, undo it.
• Start within 20 seconds. If the canvas is still empty after that, your turn is skipped. Put down the main outline first, then think.

Finger, stylus or tablet?

A finger works — the game was played that way in the screenshots above. It is the least precise option, mostly because your finger covers the line you are drawing. A cheap capacitive stylus (the rubber-tipped kind) fixes that problem for very little money, though it will not feel like a pen. A tablet gives you a much bigger canvas, and that alone makes drawings more readable than any accessory does. We have not benchmarked specific styluses, so we will not recommend one.

Limitations to know about

• The canvas keeps a 4:3 shape and, on a phone held upright, is only as wide as the screen — roughly the size shown in the screenshots above.
• There is no pressure sensitivity; line width comes from the brush size you choose.
• There is no app. Adding the page to your home screen works as a shortcut, but it is still the browser.