How to play Blank Canvas

Everybody gets the word except one

A card is a heading and a thing under it — Musical instruments, and a banjo. Everybody is shown both, except one person, who is shown the heading and told plainly that that is all they are getting. They know they are the fake from the first second; the rest of the table does not.

That is the whole departure from the hidden-role games on this shelf. In Out of Place and Oddword the odd one out has to work out that they are the odd one out. Here they know, and the game is what they do about it.

Twice round the table, a line at a time

The pen goes round the table in an order shuffled that round, and on your turn you draw exactly one unbroken line on the shared sheet. Lift your finger and the line waits on your screen until you play it, so a stray tap does not spend a turn. You can pass and draw nothing, which is sometimes the strongest move and always a suspicious one.

Every line is drawn in the colour of the person who drew it, the way the published game hands out coloured markers. Without that the vote at the end is a memory test about who went when.

Two lines each is the whole of what you get. The tension is drawing one good enough to prove you know what it is and no better — because the second-best line on the sheet is what a table votes for.

Then the slips go down

One vote each, face down until they are all down, naming whoever you think never had the word. Most names them. A tie names nobody, and so does a table that all abstained — and either way the fake walks, so agreeing on the wrong person costs exactly what agreeing on nobody costs.

If the room does name them, they get one last word: four candidates from the same heading, one of them right. Say it and they take the round anyway. That is the ending that stops a caught fake from being a wasted round, and it is why a table that has found somebody still has to hope they were guessing.

Questions people ask

Do I need to be able to draw?

No, and less than in any other drawing game, because you are only ever drawing one line. A recognisable thing gets built by four or five people a stroke at a time, and the person who draws a wobbly one is indistinguishable from the person who is guessing — which is the game working, not you failing at it.

What does the fake actually do?

Watch what has already been drawn and add something that belongs. With the heading and two lines already on the sheet you can usually make a decent guess; the difficulty is that drawing it well is exactly as incriminating as drawing it badly, because a line that is too confident is the one people remember.

Is there a player who runs the round?

No. The published game has a Question Master who invents the word and sits out; here the deck deals it, so everybody draws and everybody votes. On a call the person sitting out is a person watching, and the smallest table this takes is four.

Can I play it on my own?

No. It is the third game here with no machine to play against — a stand-in can neither draw a line nor look at four of them and work out who did not know what they were drawing.

Does anybody have to install anything to play Blank Canvas?

No. It runs in the browser everyone already has open. One person opens a room, reads out the six-character code or pastes the link into the channel, and everyone else is at the table in a couple of seconds.

Do we need accounts?

No. There is no sign-up, no password and no email address anywhere in the flow. You pick a name when you sit down, and that is the whole of it.

How many people can play Blank Canvas?

4 to 8 — best with six. A room seats up to 12.

How long does a game of Blank Canvas take?

About 15 minutes, which is the length of a coffee break rather than the length of a games night. Nobody is the host in the sense of holding the controls, so a round finishes whether or not everyone is still looking at it.

Does it work over a video call?

That is what it is for. The game is on the screen and the talking is on the call — nobody has to describe a board to anybody, and the parts that must stay private stay on the server rather than being read out.