Some games earn a permanent seat in your group chat's hall of fame. Gartic Phone is one of them. The drawing-telephone format — write a sentence, draw the sentence, describe the drawing, draw that description — reliably transforms "a knight who is afraid of his horse" into "a sad taco attending prom," and nobody can explain what happened in between. If your friend group has ever wheezed through a 1am results reveal, you already know the magic.
So when people ask us about games like Gartic Phone, we take the question seriously, because that specific kind of joy is worth chasing. Here's our honest tour of the best drawing party games around, what each one does brilliantly — and the one thing they all quietly require, which is where we come in.
Games like Gartic Phone worth your next game night
skribbl.io. The most frictionless Pictionary on the internet. One player draws a secret word, everyone else races to type the guess, points rain down. No accounts, no downloads, works in any browser, and it handles big groups happily. Best for: spontaneous "everyone's already on voice chat" evenings when you want a game running in forty-five seconds.
Drawful 2 and the Jackbox family. The premium couch option. One screen shows the game, everyone's phone becomes a controller, and the prompts are engineered to be weird in exactly the right way. Drawful's genius move is having players write fake answers for each other's drawings, so even a bad drawing generates comedy twice. Best for: in-person parties, family gatherings, and streamed game nights where a little production value matters.
Draw Something. The elder statesman of mobile drawing games, and the only famous one that's turn-based. You draw a word, your friend guesses it whenever they open the app, then draws one back. It proved a decade ago that drawing games don't need everyone in the same room at the same moment. Best for: one-on-one, guess-the-word fun on your own schedule.
Telestrations and good old paper telephone. The offline original that Gartic Phone digitized. Booklets pass around a table, alternating between writing and drawing, and the final reveal is somehow even funnier when everyone is pointing at physical paper. Best for: cabins, holidays, and any table with more snacks than Wi-Fi.
All of these are genuinely great, and we'd happily play any of them tonight. Which brings us to the problem: tonight is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
The lobby problem
Every game above — even the mighty Gartic Phone — needs the same expensive ingredient: everybody, online, at the same time. A lobby. A scheduled evening. A group chat poll that dies at "how about Thursday?" followed by three thumbs-ups and one "wait, this Thursday?"
Adult friendship runs on mismatched calendars. Time zones, night shifts, toddlers, deadlines. So drawing-game joy gets rationed to game night, which happens... monthly? Quarterly? In between, the group chat goes back to plain text, and that particular kind of laughing — the kind only a badly drawn horse can cause — waits patiently for the next lobby.
We kept wondering: what if the drawing part didn't have to wait?
Wablo: for the space between game nights
Wablo is a finger-doodle messenger for iPhone. Every message is a drawing — made with your fingertip, on a small sheet of grid paper, in a warm crayon-textured line — sent to one close friend, whenever you happen to have thirty seconds.
And we do mean thirty seconds: a timer runs while you draw, and when it hits zero, your doodle sends, finished or not. That's not a punishment; it's the same trick Gartic Phone uses. Time pressure keeps drawings loose, fast, and funny, and it puts your art-school friend and your stick-figure friend on exactly the same level.
Drawings from your close friends arrive as a little stack of cards. You look at the top card, swipe to the next, and double-tap to leave a small reaction mark — up to five per card, which sounds excessive until a truly great penguin arrives. Stuck for material? Prompts are built right in, and you can browse the full prompt library for ideas like "a snail running late."
No lobby. No scheduling poll. No "wait, this Thursday?" The game just... continues, one doodle at a time.
Telephone-style games you can play async
A few ways we've seen friends carry the Gartic Phone spirit into a slow-motion format:
- The two-person relay. Draw a creature's head and send it. Your friend draws a body for whatever they think that head implied. Reveal, laugh, start the next round.
- Guess my day. Draw one scene from your day; they reply with a caption drawn as a picture. Wrongness is the point.
- Same prompt, parallel worlds. You both draw "a dragon at the dentist" and compare results across the card stack.
- The memory chain. Your friend must redraw your doodle purely from memory and send it back. Degradation guaranteed, delight likewise.
Keep the pens moving
Keep Gartic Phone for game night — truly, it's a treasure. But between lobbies, your friends are still out there, phones in pockets, thirty spare seconds at a time.
Download Wablo free on the App Store and keep the drawing-telephone spirit running all week. The horse can stay badly drawn. That was always the best part.