One team draws the truth. Everyone else plants a lie.
Two to four teams and one word. The artist's team has never seen it and has to find it in a list; every other team has, and spends the round writing a fake good enough to be picked instead. Points go to whoever was believed.
One of these is the word. The rest are lies.
Round 2
Yuki
draws for The Deadline Dodgers
Every other team is writing a decoy for the same word.
3 decoys in
Scores
How it works
- 01
One QR code, two to four teams
Everyone scans and lands on a team. Each round one person becomes the artist, and the role rotates, so by the end of the game everybody has had a turn drawing.
- 02
The other teams write the lies
Every team except the artist's sees the real word and writes something plausible instead. Near-duplicates and synonyms are weeded out, so the list is a set of real choices rather than one word spelled six ways.
- 03
Draw and vote at the same time
The artist draws — writing the word is not allowed — while their own teammates pick the truth out of a shuffled list of the word and every decoy. The clock runs on both at once.
Built for forty people and one screen
Most team games do not survive being scaled up. Eight people around a table can all be in the same round; forty in an all-hands cannot, so the game quietly becomes four people playing and thirty-six watching them play. That is the failure this one is designed around.
The fix is giving the teams who are not drawing the more interesting half. They know the word — which means they are not spectators, they are the opposition, and their job is to write something the other team will believe. A good decoy gets picked, and getting picked pays, so there is a real reason to think about it rather than type the first thing that comes to mind.
What that produces in a room is a specific kind of noise: one team going quiet and squinting at a drawing while three others try very hard to look innocent. It is the same thing that makes hidden-role games work, arriving in a format that fits in a slide, needs no props, and can be run by whoever is already standing at the front.
FAQ
Doodler Decoy, explained
How does Doodler Decoy work?
The room splits into two to four teams. One team's artist gets a word to draw and their own teammates have never seen it — but every other team has, and spends the round writing a convincing fake. The artist's team then has to find the real word among the decoys while the drawing is still going up.
How is this different from a normal drawing game?
In a normal drawing game the teams that are not drawing have nothing to do but wait. Here they have the best job in the round: they know the answer, and they are trying to bury it. Every team is playing on every turn, which is what makes it work at forty people rather than eight.
Who votes?
Only the artist's own team, because they are the only people in the room who do not know the word. Everyone else has seen it and spends the round watching their lie either work or fail, which is its own kind of fun.
How does the scoring work?
A correct vote pays the artist's team — they drew it well and read it right. A wrong vote pays only the team whose decoy was picked, and the payout is the base points divided by how many decoys are on the board. A crowded list is therefore worth less per lie, so writing five decoys is not five times better than writing one.
What stops the artist just writing the word?
The rule, and the fact that everyone can see the canvas as it fills. It is a game played in one room in front of everybody, so the enforcement is the same as it is at a table — except that the other teams, who know the word, are watching for it hardest of all.
Can the artist's team see the word early?
No, and that is not a promise their browser is making. The word is delivered to the people entitled to it and to nobody else, so it is not in the slide, not in the broadcast and not sitting in a teammate's page waiting to be found.
How long does a game take?
A round is a couple of minutes — a short window to write decoys, then the drawing and the voting together — and you decide how many rounds to run. Three or four is a good energiser between sessions; a full rotation is a decent chunk of an offsite.
Do participants need an app or an account?
No. They scan a QR code or open a link and draw, write and vote in their phone's browser. Nothing to install and no sign-up.
How many people can join?
The Free plan supports up to 50 participants per live activity, Pro raises that to 150, and Badass supports up to 300 — enough for a full classroom or an all-hands.
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