Somewhere out there, right now, a group of friends is crying with laughter because someone drew "helicopter" and it came out looking like an angry banana. Drawing games do this reliably. They're the great equalizer of game night: nobody's rank matters, nobody's reflexes matter, and the friend who "can't draw" is usually the MVP.
We make a drawing app for a living, so people often ask us which drawing games to play with friends online. The honest answer: it depends on the night you're planning — and on whether you're planning a night at all. Here's our fair, genuinely fond guide to the main types, followed by the odd one out that we happen to have built.
Draw-and-guess lobbies
The classic. One player draws a secret word while everyone else types frantic guesses; points for speed, eternal glory for whoever deciphers "photosynthesis" from a green scribble. Browser-based versions (skribbl.io is the famous one) run anywhere, need no accounts, and scale from three friends to a dozen strangers.
Best for: big groups, zero setup, competitive chaos. The trade-off: rounds move fast and the drawings vanish just as fast. It's a party, not a keepsake.
Telephone-drawing games
The Gartic Phone family. You write a sentence, the next player draws it, the player after that describes the drawing, and so on down the line, until "a knight buying groceries" has mutated into "sad robot wedding." The final reveal — a slideshow of exactly how the message fell apart — is the whole game, and it is glorious.
Best for: maximum laughs per minute, groups of five or more, friends with absurdist tendencies. The trade-off: it needs a quorum. With two or three players, the telephone line is too short to break properly.
Pictionary over a video call
The lowest-tech option: a video call, a shared whiteboard (or actual paper held up to the camera), and teams. It's the same Pictionary you played on somebody's living-room floor, ported to wherever your people live now.
Best for: mixed generations, relatives, and friends who refuse to download anything. The trade-off: somebody has to host, keep score, and herd everyone into the same hour — which is a part-time job.
Collaborative relay doodles
Less a product, more a folk tradition: one person starts a drawing, passes it on, and each friend adds something until a masterpiece (or a crime scene) emerges. You can play it over almost anything that lets you mark up an image.
Best for: small crews, no time pressure, friends who'd rather build something together than compete. The trade-off: without a little structure, relays stall on whoever's busiest.
The fine print on game night
Notice what all four have in common: they're events. Same lobby, same hour, everyone online at once. When it happens, it's wonderful. But scheduling is the boss battle of adult friendship — you know this if you've ever watched a group chat spend eleven days failing to agree on a Friday.
That's why these games tend to be occasions rather than habits. You play, you howl, you say "we should do this more often," and the lobby closes.
The one that lives inside the friendship
Wablo is the odd one out on this list because it isn't a game night — it's a messenger. Every message is a finger doodle on a small sheet of grid paper, drawn in a crayon-textured line, with a 30-second timer keeping everything fast and loose. There's no lobby to fill and no hour to agree on. You draw an octopus doing its taxes at lunch; your friend finds it at midnight and draws back.
The game-like parts are still there — just woven into ordinary days:
- The 30-second timer is the challenge. When time runs out, the doodle sends as-is. Half-finished octopi are canon.
- Built-in prompts are the deck of cards. Out of ideas? Pull one. You can browse the whole prompt library to see the flavor — silly, drawable, thirty seconds tops.
- The card stack is the reveal. Doodles from close friends arrive as a stack of cards. You look at the top one, swipe to the next, and double-tap to leave a little reaction mark.
And there's no scoreboard, no audience, no feed. Nobody wins; the friendship does. If a draw-and-guess lobby is a house party, Wablo is the note passed under the desk during class — smaller, quieter, and somehow the one you remember years later.
Which drawing games to play with friends online?
All of them, honestly, for different nights:
- Big rowdy group, one hour, tonight? A draw-and-guess lobby.
- Five-plus friends who love absurdity? Telephone drawing.
- Grandparents included? Pictionary on a video call.
- A small crew building one weird thing? A relay doodle.
- One or two favorite people, every ordinary day in between? That's us.
The best drawing game is the one that actually happens. Game nights need calendars. Doodle messages need thirty seconds and a person you like.
Download Wablo free on the App Store and start the drawing game that never needs scheduling. First prompt suggestion: an octopus doing its taxes. You're welcome.