Draw and guess online: how to play with friends, even if you cannot draw

One player draws a word, everyone else guesses it, and the faster you guess, the more you score. In German it is known as Montagsmaler; in English it goes by draw and guess, or by the name of the board game everybody owns. It needs no knowledge at all, works for every age, and is reliably funniest when the drawing is worst.

Online it loses the one thing that made it awkward on paper: everybody crowding round one sheet. The canvas is on every screen at the same time, stroke by stroke, so a group spread across four cities sees the same terrible giraffe come together in real time.

The drawer is offered three words and has fifteen seconds to pick one. That choice matters more than it looks: the same turn can be a gentle "house" or a brutal "lighthouse", and choosing what you can draw is half of drawing well.

Then the clock starts and the canvas is live for everyone. There are sixteen colours, four brush sizes, an eraser, undo and clear, and it works with a mouse, a finger on a phone or a pen on a tablet. The others see blanks for the letters of the word — so they know its length and where a space or hyphen falls — and type guesses into the chat.

As the turn runs down, letters are given away: one at 45 percent of the time, another at 65, a last one at 80. Never more than three, and never more than four in ten, so even a short word still has to be guessed. The turn ends when everybody has the word or the time is up, and then the word is shown to all.

A guess is worth more the earlier it comes. The first correct guesser gets 100 for being first plus up to 150 for how much time was left; every later guesser gets 20 less for their place, never under 50, plus their own speed bonus. The drawer earns 40 for each person who gets it, which makes a clear drawing worth more than a clever one.

Correct guesses are not shown to the rest of the room — you see that someone got it, never what they typed — so nobody can copy the answer out of the chat. A guess that is almost right earns a private "close". Articles and plural endings are forgiven, so "a cat" and "cats" both count for "cat".

Draw the one thing that makes it that thing. A giraffe is a long neck; a lighthouse is a striped tower with lines coming out of the top. Get the defining feature on the canvas in the first ten seconds and add detail only if the room is still lost.

Use context. A fish alone is a fish; a fish in a bowl on a table is a pet. A small scene around the object narrows the guesses faster than a better object would.

Lean on arrows, size and colour. An arrow pointing at the part that matters, a tiny person next to something huge, blue for water and yellow for sun — these carry more meaning than any amount of shading.

Split compound words. "Snowman" is a snowflake, a plus sign and a person. Most players will get there before you finish the person.

And do not write letters on the canvas. Nothing stops you, which is exactly why it is worth saying: a word written out ends the turn for everyone, including the fun.

Type early and type often. Wrong guesses cost nothing, and a stream of them shows the drawer what the room thinks it is looking at — "dog? cat? fox?" tells them the ears are working and the tail is not.

Use the blanks. Six letters with a gap after the third is a two-word answer, and that alone rules out most of what you were about to type. Every revealed letter is worth re-reading the whole word for.

Guess the category before the word. A drawing that is obviously food, or obviously an animal, is a small set of answers; run through it quickly instead of waiting for the picture to finish.

The words come from a hand-written list of about 750 per language, in three levels the host picks in the lobby. Easy is everyday things like "house" or "apple"; medium needs a detail or a little scene, like "lighthouse" or "hot-air balloon"; hard is the abstract or rare end, like "solar eclipse" or "stage fright". On mixed, the default, the drawer is offered one word of each level, so a nervous first-timer can always take the easy one, and a show-off can take the hard one.

The language of the words is set in the lobby before the game starts, and a guess only counts in that language — so a German group playing in English knows to type "cow" and not "Kuh". Every player draws once per round; a game is one to three rounds, at 60 to 120 seconds per turn.

Families, because a six-year-old and a grandparent are equally bad at drawing. Classes, because it needs no preparation and every student has a turn. Teams on a call, because it is the rare remote game where the quiet person draws something absurd and becomes the story of the meeting. Two players works; three to eight is where it is best.

Voice is optional. Most groups talk while they play — "is that a … horse?" — but the whole game also works by chat alone, with cameras off.

• Play Taboo online — the talking version
• Quizzes and games in the classroom

Open a room, choose Draw & guess as the mode, set the word language, and send the six-character code. Everybody presses ready, the host presses start, and the first drawer gets three words to choose from. No downloads, nothing to install — it runs in the browser on a phone as well as on a laptop.