Gartic Phone is genuinely excellent and this page is not pretending otherwise. But it has two real limits: the drawing-chain format gets slow as the group grows, and the fun is in the replay rather than in competing. If either is your problem, these are the alternatives worth knowing.
Drawblins is one of the seven and it is ours. Free tiers and player caps change; check before planning an event.
1. skribbl.io — the competitive version
The obvious swap when you want a race rather than a replay. One person draws, everyone types guesses, points go to whoever is fastest. It is a genuinely different feeling from Gartic Phone: sharper, shorter and more competitive.
2. Drawasaurus — skribbl with private rooms and custom words
The same draw-and-guess race, with private rooms and your own word lists without an account. The pick if you want competitive drawing but with words that mean something to your group.
3. Doodle Duel — no turns at all
Everyone draws the same prompt simultaneously and the drawings are scored against each other. This solves the specific thing that makes Gartic Phone drag — nobody waits for a chain to reach them.
4. Drawize — for mixed-language groups
A conventional drawing game with a deep word database and multi-language support, which matters if your group is not all playing in the same first language.
5. Caption Clash — the writing half, without the drawing
If what your group actually enjoys about Gartic Phone is the absurd captions rather than the pictures, Caption Clash is that part on its own: write the funniest response to a prompt, then the room votes. Faster, and better for people who insist they cannot draw.
6. Bluff Trivia — deception instead of drawing
Bluff Trivia keeps the “everyone submits something and the room reacts” shape but swaps drawing for lying: write a fake answer to an obscure question, try to fool people, then hunt for the real one. It gets better with more players rather than worse.
7. Drawblins — when the group is bigger than 30
Ours. Gartic Phone slows as the chain lengthens, so past roughly thirty people you are watching more than playing. Draw & Guess here splits the roles instead: up to 30 draw while up to 500 total guess in chat and score on the same leaderboard, so a large room stays busy. Eight games share one room, with optional Red vs Blue teams.
For eight friends who want to laugh at a mutating drawing chain, Gartic Phone is still the better night. This is for the case where the room is too big for that to work — see which games actually scale above 20 people.
How to pick
| If you want… | Use |
|---|---|
| Something competitive instead of silly | skribbl.io |
| Custom words in a private room | Drawasaurus |
| No waiting for turns | Doodle Duel |
| The captions without the drawing | Caption Clash |
| A game that improves with more people | Bluff Trivia |
| More than about 30 people | Drawblins |
When Gartic Phone is still the right answer
For a group of six to fifteen who want to laugh rather than compete, nothing here beats it. The replay at the end of a round is a genuinely original piece of game design and none of the alternatives reproduce it. Swap it out when the group outgrows the format, not because something else is better at what it does.
Comparing something else? We have the same rundown for Jackbox alternatives and skribbl.io alternatives.