7 Drawing Games to Play with Friends Online

Drawing games are the great equalizer of game nights: being bad at drawing makes them funnier, so nobody gets to sit out with 'I can't draw.' The worse the art, the better the round.

Seven games, all playable online with friends. Player counts are suggestions; chaos scales.

1. Guess-the-drawing (the classic)

One person draws a secret word; everyone else guesses in chat. Rotate. The magic is in the word list — mix easy ('pizza'), hard ('nostalgia'), and cursed ('your boss'). Dedicated sites exist with timers and scoring, or run it barebones over any video call with a shared whiteboard. 3–10 players.

2. Telephone drawing

Player one writes a sentence. Player two draws it. Player three sees only the drawing and describes it in a sentence. Player four draws that sentence. Continue alternating; reveal the full chain at the end. 'A cat stealing a sandwich' reliably becomes 'government surveillance' in six steps. The reveal is the best minute of any game night. 4+ players, best with 6–8.

3. Exquisite corpse (fold-over faces)

Born as a paper game: fold a sheet in thirds, one person draws the head, next draws the body, next the legs — nobody sees the previous section. Online, split a face instead: one person draws the hair and brows, the next the eyes, the next the mouth and chin, each seeing only the edges of the previous part. Reassemble and behold the monstrosity. 3 players per face.

4. Speed portraits

Everyone draws the same person — a group member, a celebrity, the host's dog — in 60 seconds, then all portraits are revealed at once. Vote for 'most accurate' and 'least flattering.' A shared anonymous wall makes the reveal better: on DRAWMYFACE, make a private wall, everyone draws to the same link, and the portraits appear side by side with no names attached. Guessing who drew which is a bonus round in itself. 3–15 players.

5. One-line portraits

Draw a face without lifting the pen — one continuous line from start to finish. Once the line ends, the drawing is done, no touch-ups. Surprisingly meditative solo, competitive in a group ('one line, 30 seconds, draw the host'). The results have a weird elegance that normal doodles never get. Any player count.

6. Eyes-closed faces

Everyone draws the same simple prompt — 'a happy face with glasses' — with their eyes fully closed. No peeking between strokes; spatial memory only. Eyes end up on foreheads, glasses orbit the head like satellites. The gap between what your hand thought it did and what it actually did is the comedy engine. 2+ players.

7. Wall doodle jam

The no-rules option: open a shared drawing wall, drop the link in the group chat, and let people add faces whenever they wander by over a day or a week. No turns, no timer, no winner — the wall itself is the result, a slow-motion group portrait of everyone's boredom. Works for friend groups, classrooms, and Discord servers alike. Any wall tool works; DRAWMYFACE was built for exactly this, with private walls for your group or an open wall if you want strangers in the jam too.

Making any of these better

Three universal upgrades: put a timer on everything (scarcity is funny), keep drawings anonymous until the reveal (people take real swings when there's no name attached), and screenshot the best disasters — a group chat's hall-of-fame album of terrible portraits is a gift that keeps paying out for years.