Telephone with a pen. Your sentence becomes someone's drawing becomes someone else's very wrong caption, and by the end nobody remembers where it started.
- Players
- 4 to 16
- Where
- one video call
- Gear
- any browser
- Mood
- silly, creative
A tidy sentence about team lunch came back four hops later as a confession. I kept the slideshow.
rosaHow to play, in 60 seconds
- Goal
- Build telephone chains by alternating sentences and drawings, then reveal how each original prompt changed.
- Set up
- Create a room at Gartic Phone, share the invite link, and choose Normal. Everyone joins in a browser with a nickname; add a voice call if the group is remote.
- Play
- Everyone writes an opening sentence. Draw the sentence shown on drawing turns, then describe the drawing shown on writing turns. Keep alternating until the last turn.
- Finish
- Reveal the completed albums and follow each chain from beginning to end. Normal mode has no score or winner.
- Easy to miss
- These rules are for Normal mode. Score and the other presets change the turn structure, so check the selected mode before you begin.
Rules source Gartic Phone: How to Play, checked July 29, 2026
Teach it aloud opens full screen: five lines, one at a time, then a one-minute practice turn nobody scores.
Round one
The prompt
The team got lunch together on Thursday.
Nobody is bad at this. Every hop loses one fact, and the next person replaces it with something better.
Your sentence, four hops later
Everyone starts by typing a sentence. The next person draws it without words, using whatever trackpad skills they have. The person after that sees only the drawing and writes a caption, usually not what the first writer meant. The chain moves through the group until the slideshow reveals how unrecognizable the original sentence has become.
Mouse drawing is rough, which is part of how a normal sentence becomes a felony charge by round four. Gartic Phone runs entirely in the browser and costs nothing. Share the room link and everyone can start.
Our take after twelve games
Gartic Phone asks for a browser tab and a working sense of shame. The middle steps are funniest when they are confidently wrong. A sentence about a dog stealing a sandwich becomes an accusation four hops later. A tidy pitch for "team lunch" once arrived as a confession to a crime nobody committed.
It needs no download and works when half the group is on their phones anyway. We would call it a warm-up, except we have never managed to stop after the warm-up.
From the table
“Rosa draws the same horse every round no matter the prompt. Twice now the horse has been correct.”
einar
“I had ten seconds left, so I drew the sandwich and skipped the dog. The next caption was a court date.”
maya
