Back-to-back drawing: how to play, with pictures to describe

Back-to-back drawing is a game for two people and one picture. One person holds the picture and describes it. The other draws it from the words alone, and neither can see the other's paper. Then you turn round and compare, and the gap between the two drawings is the lesson.

It turns up wherever people practise saying exactly what they mean. In schools, children describe a picture for a partner to draw while sitting back to back. BYU's HR training manual runs it to help staff think about their communication skills, and Therapist Aid publishes it as an exercise for groups and couples.

This page has the rules, three rounds that change what the drawer may say, two printable sheets of pictures to describe, and the questions to ask afterwards. It ends with the version for a whole class or team, where a few people describe a face and everyone else draws it at once.

How to play back-to-back drawing

You need one picture for each pair, a blank sheet and a pen for each drawer, and something firm to lean on.

1. Pair up and sit back to back, on chairs or on the floor. Nobody turns round until the end.
2. Give the picture to the describer. The drawer gets the blank sheet and never sees the picture.
3. Describe it without naming it. Talk the drawer through the picture in shapes, sizes and positions: "a big square in the middle of the page, with a triangle sitting on top". Saying "draw a house" ends the game.
4. Stop after a few minutes, or when the describer has nothing left to say.
5. Turn round and compare. Put the picture beside the drawing and find the first place they went different.
6. Swap roles and play again with a new picture.

The no-naming rule is the heart of the game. SessionLab's write-up says the describer is not allowed to say what the shape is, and BYU's manual has them describe the drawing without telling their partner outright what it is.

Plan on 15 to 25 minutes for the whole activity, talk included, which is what BYU's manual allows. A simple shape goes much faster: SessionLab's version gives it thirty seconds to a minute before moving on to harder pictures.

Play it in three rounds

Managing Virtual Teams' version plays three rounds with three rules. Use a new picture each round.

1. The drawer stays silent. No questions and no groans, only the describer's voice.
2. Yes or no questions only. The drawer can check a guess, such as "Is the circle touching the square?", and the describer answers in one word.
3. Anything goes. The drawer asks whatever they like.

Afterwards, lay each pair's three drawings side by side. Nothing changed between them but the rule about questions, which is the point to make in the talk afterwards.

Pictures to describe, from easy to hard

Print this sheet and cut along the dashed lines to make six cards. Start with the house or the snowman, where the hard part is not saying the name. Pictures five and six show no object at all. With no name to give away, every word has to be a shape, a size or a place on the page.

A few habits make any picture easier to describe:

• Start with the biggest shape, and say where it sits: top left, the middle, along the bottom edge.
• Give sizes against the page. "About half as wide as the page" beats "quite big".
• Say how many before you say what. "There are three dots" comes before "the first dot is".
• Say what touches. Name what overlaps, what sits inside something else and what meets at a corner.

Any simple line drawing works as a card. A coffee mug, a bicycle, a key or a cat's face built from circles and triangles all describe well.

Describe a face, then find it in a line-up

A face is harder than a house. There are no corners to count, and the details that matter are small. This sheet holds six painted suspects drawn for Decka's live drawing game, Draw the Suspect.

1. The describer picks a face in secret, by rolling a die or choosing a number from one to six.
2. They describe it while the drawer sketches, without saying its number.
3. The drawer picks it out. With the sketch finished, the drawer looks at all six faces and points to the one they drew.

Describe what anyone can see: hair, glasses, a hat, earrings, clothes and expression. Draw the Suspect's AI witnesses keep to the same rule. They describe hair, glasses, headwear, accessories, expression, clothing colours and the background, and never age, ethnicity, body, looks or a name.

Back-to-back drawing for a whole class or team

Pairs get slow in a big room. Thirty people need fifteen pictures, and you can only watch one pair at a time. Managing Virtual Teams has the fix for a large group: one person describes for everyone, nobody else speaks, everyone draws, and then the whole room compares.

Draw the Suspect is that version on phones, with a mystery added. It runs on one big screen at the front, and everyone plays in their phone's browser, with no app and no account. Each case runs like this:

1. One face is the suspect. Players can take a mugshot as they join, and one of those faces is picked in secret.
2. The witnesses describe it. Two witnesses, or three in a group of seven or more, press and hold to peek at the face on their own phone, for three seconds in all. Then each types one clue. A game of three or four may have only one witness.
3. Everyone else sketches. They draw the suspect on their phone from the clues, with 60 seconds on the clock by default, or 45 or 90.
4. The line-up. The sketches go up on a line-up wall on the big screen. Everyone votes for the best likeness and then picks who it was from a line-up of up to six faces.
5. The reveal. The mugshot drops in with an IDENTIFIED stamp, beside the best sketch.

Each vote for your sketch scores 100, and the best likeness of the case scores 200 more. Naming the right face scores 100. The witnesses score 50 for every vote the case's sketches get, up to 300, so a clear clue pays off for the person who gave it.

For a class, the ready-made "Describe and draw" game turns mugshots off and gives the longest sketch clock, 90 seconds. Mugshots start off for school use anyway, so every suspect comes from Decka's own illustrated case files. If you do play with mugshots, anyone can skip theirs, and a player who skips is never the suspect. Mugshots and sketches stay in your report for 90 days, then are deleted.

A host can also choose AI witnesses instead of witness players. An AI looks at the suspect's mugshot and writes three short statements that disagree on at least one detail, so the room has to weigh them. Each AI case uses AI credits from your plan.

A game needs at least three players, and the host needs a free Decka account. From twelve players, the room splits into precincts of six or more, each with its own suspect and witnesses, all sketching at once. How many phones one game takes depends on your plan, and the pricing page has the numbers.

To try a case on your own first, the free Daily line-up has five cases a day, the same for everyone. Each case has three witness statements that never quite agree, an optional 60-second sketch and a line-up of six painted faces. There is no sign-up, and your sketch stays on your device.

Questions to ask after back-to-back drawing

The talk afterwards is where the game earns its time. Ask the describers first, then the drawers, then everyone.

For the describers:

• What was hardest to put into words, and what did you try instead?
• When did you guess your partner had gone wrong, and what told you?
• How hard was it not to say what the picture was?

For the drawers:

• Which instruction helped most, and which one sent you the wrong way?
• In the silent round, what did you most want to ask?

For everyone:

• What changed once the drawer could ask questions?
• Where do we give instructions like the silent round, at work or in class?

If one person described a picture for the whole room, ask the question from Managing Virtual Teams' debrief: everyone heard the same message, so why are all the pictures different?

Making it easier or harder

For younger children, use the house, the snowman and the sailboat, and let the drawer ask questions from the start. Keep each picture short, and swap roles often so everyone gets to describe.

For adults and teams, start at picture five and play the silent round first. Add a clock of two minutes, or have the describer face the room while three drawers work from the same description.

Back-to-back drawing online

On a video call nobody has to sit back to back. Participatory Methods' version shares the image with the describer only, while the drawer works on paper or a digital whiteboard and shows the result on camera.

In practice, send the picture to the describer in a private message. Ask the drawer to turn their camera away from the paper until the end, then have both hold the picture and the drawing up to the camera together.