The game that I played was skribbl.io which was created by GOAT Games, published by IO games, and available to play on the internet by anyone.
The target audience seems to be anyone. It can be groups of friends who want to play a game together, especially if they aren’t together in person and want to play a fun online game. It can also be for random people on the internet who have 10-15 min of free time and want to play a fun game.
Elements:
- 2-20 players, makes more sense with at least 3 people but can be done with 2.
- Number of rounds (2-10), every player goes around to complete one round
- Drawtime (15-240 seconds)
- Players go around and pick 1 word from a set of 3 and draw the word
- The rest of the players guess what the drawer is drawing
- At the top of the game, there’s x number of blanks to indicate the # of letters of the word to guess
- As time passes, letters become revealed in the blanks and act as hints
This game is a very fellowship heavy game with aspects of competition as well. You go around and have one person draw each time, but all of the rest of the players form a team in one sense to figure out what the drawing is. The game format that allows for this collaboration is the crowdsourced nature of the guesses. The guesses go into a chat that everyone can see, so you can almost work together and build off of different people’s ideas which makes this game really fun. It’a also very fun because no one really knows if their guess is going to be correct or even go in the right direction until they get it right or not. At that point, it becomes a lot more competitive since you’re racing against each other to answer first and get more points, but I think that even at that point, the game is super interesting since you can track back the answers and thought processes that the people who guess correctly first were thinking and try to reason out the answer from there. Furthermore, there are always chance occurrences where a player guesses something completely random towards the beginning of the round based on the number of blanks that show the number of letters in the word and gets it correct. These occurrences are allowed and almost facilitated by showing the clue of the number of letters, and these one off luck based guesses always make everyone feel incredulous and results in lots of laughs.
As noted before, skribbl.io is a very online based game and not one that would normally be played when all your friends are together in person. I think that this differentiates it from other games in this genre of judging games which are often played in person, such as Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity. I think that this online aspect solves the problem of when friends are not together and allows for lots of connection despite the distance. One thing that could be added to augment the game would be some form of video call or voice chat feature that allows for friends to talk to each other while playing the game. When playing this game over COVID, I remember hopping on a zoom call in addition to the skribbl.io game, and I think this is a problem that can easily be solved by adding a game feature.
Skribbl.io is not a game in which the players need to get super vulnerable, but it does test the players’ drawing skills. I think that different versions of Skribbl.io that work along different types of skills such as music or acting, as opposed to drawing could be fun if there was a good way to incorporate it into a simple online format. The in-person games of this variety are plentiful, but it’s interesting to see how Skribbl.io alone is one of this type of judging game that became popular online.
