How to play Title Cards

Everybody draws, and everybody draws something different

Your card reaches your browser and nobody else's, and it is a phrase rather than an object — somebody doing one thing, in the register a person types in. That is load-bearing rather than decorative: on the ballot the real card is one line among five invented ones, and a bare noun sitting beside five jokes could be picked out without looking at the drawing at all.

One minute, and the whole room is drawing at once on its own sheet. Nobody can see anybody else's while it is being drawn on, which is a rule about the card rather than about the picture: a sheet in progress is somebody's prompt without the string. The phase ends on the last pen down or on the clock, whichever comes first.

You get a pen, an undo and a start-again, and that is the whole of the equipment. Badly is fine. Nothing in the round pays for a good drawing as such.

Then the drawings go up one at a time and you name them

One drawing on the easel, and everybody except the person who drew it writes a title for it. The artist neither writes one nor votes later: they know the answer, so there is nothing left for them to do but watch the room work it out, which is the best seat at the table for the forty seconds it lasts.

You can pass, and if you say nothing the clock passes for you. A pass is not a penalty — the ballot is one line shorter and the round carries on.

A title that happens to be the real card is refused. So is a title somebody else has already written, in exactly the same words, and the two are impossible to tell apart on purpose: a refusal that said which would hand one person, privately and half a minute early, the thing the whole room is about to be paid two points for finding.

The ballot has no names on it, and then it has all of them

The titles are shuffled together with the real card into a random position and the room votes on a list with nothing but text on it. Your own line is on that list — a ballot one line short would tell everybody how many titles were written — and it is not pressable, because you cannot vote for yourself.

The moment the ballot shuts, every line is printed with the person who wrote it and every vote with the person who cast it. That half is not optional and there is no setting for it: a game where you can fool four colleagues anonymously and never be caught doing it stops being funny after one round.

Two rounds, and that is a sitting

Everybody draws twice. The first round is a table finding out what it thinks is funny and the second is everybody using what they learned, which is the entire reason there is a second one. Six people is twelve drawings and about twenty minutes.

Nobody is eliminated, nobody sits a round out, and somebody who joins late is seated and dealt in at the next deal rather than parked. A person who closes the tab in the middle takes their unfinished easel with them; everything already banked keeps its points.

Questions people ask

Do I need to be able to draw?

No, and the score sheet is the argument rather than the reassurance. The person who drew the picture is paid a point for every player who finds the real card and nothing at all when nobody does — there is no deduction anywhere on the sheet, so a hopeless drawing costs you the round it was in and not a point more. Rounds are usually won by whoever writes the best line under somebody else's picture.

What if I type the real answer by accident?

It is refused, and it will not tell you that that is why. The same refusal comes back when somebody else has already written the line you typed, and the two are made indistinguishable deliberately — a message that told you which one it was would be a private oracle for the answer. Type something else; both facts are public inside the minute anyway.

Does everybody find out what I wrote?

Yes, every time. While the room is voting the ballot carries no authors at all, and the second it shuts every line is named and so is every vote. Both halves matter: a vote you can trace to a person before it is cast is not a vote, and a room where nobody ever learns who wrote the line that fooled them has thrown away the funniest thirty seconds of the round.

Can I play it on my own?

No. It is the fourth game here with no machine to play against. A stand-in can neither draw the card it was dealt nor look at somebody else's drawing and invent a caption that a room of people would fall for, and a chair that could only abstain is not a player.

Does anybody have to install anything to play Title Cards?

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 Title Cards?

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

How long does a game of Title Cards take?

About 20 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.