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Pictionary word generator for game night

Spin for the next word and show the screen to the person drawing and to nobody else. Elimination is on, so a word leaves the rim once it has been used and no team is handed a word the other one already solved.

This wheel is already set up for the job. Open it in the editor to change the list, the machine or the odds.

Every spin draws from your browser’s cryptographic random source. How a draw is made sets out the method and its limits.

Open this wheel in the editor

What makes a word easy or hard to draw?

A word is easy when it has one shape. A snowman is three circles and everybody in the room holds the same picture of it, which is why it lands in ten seconds. Difficulty arrives when the word has no outline of its own: a sneeze is an event rather than an object, and a traffic jam is a situation you have to build out of several drawings before anybody can name it.

Sort your list into easy, medium and hard once and the game runs itself afterwards. The wheel on this page is deliberately mixed so a round can be either, and the six are ordered from the plainest object to the hardest idea. What difficulty is not is a comment on the person drawing: a hard word is hard for the artist at the table too.

Why should the wheel pick the word rather than the drawer?

Because somebody choosing their own word chooses the one they can draw. That is human rather than dishonest, and it quietly removes the constraint the game is made of. A wheel picks without knowing who is holding the pen, so the round is the same challenge whoever stands up.

It also frees the person who would otherwise hold the word list. Reading cards out all evening means playing none of the rounds, and in a group of five that is a fifth of the table sitting out. Elimination does the other half of the job: a word that has been drawn leaves the rim, so the second team never gets one the first team already worked out.

How long should a round be, and how is it scored?

One minute is the standard, and there is no clock in the wheel, so put a phone timer on the table. The drawer may not speak, write letters or draw numbers, and everything else is allowed. The spin duration is how long the wheel turns rather than how long the round lasts, so keep it short or the wheel eats the round it is meant to start.

A point per word guessed is enough for most tables. If the hard words should be worth having, score them two and say so before the game rather than after somebody drew one. Where the argument is about which words are hard, put the value on a wheel as well and let both draws be somebody else’s decision.

What else is this wheel good for?

It is the plain picker wheel with a word list on it, so editing, saving and sharing behave exactly as they do there. When the word is drawn and the question is what the round is worth or how many seconds it gets, the number wheel settles it without another list.

Take the guessing away and draw for its own sake, and the same rim is a set of drawing prompts. Keep the guessing and act the word out instead of drawing it, and you are playing charades.

Questions about drawing-game words

Open the wheel in the editor and paste them in, one per line. Six is what stays readable on a phone rim rather than a limit, and the wheel takes far more; a long list usually works better as two or three saved wheels you pick between. Save it and it opens with your words next time.

Two ways, and they answer different questions. Keep one wheel per level when the teams choose a level before the round, which is how the board game does it. Keep one mixed wheel and make the hard words narrower with weights when difficulty should be drawn too: a weight changes how often a word comes up, and the segment widths show the odds while you play.

Hand the device to whoever is drawing and let them spin. The result is on their screen, and full screen makes it legible at arm’s length. What not to do is put the wheel on the television and spin it there: an embedded view or a shared screen shows the word to the room, which is useful for playing charades with children and a fast way to end a round of this.

It matters less than people expect, because the game rewards recognisable rather than good. Stick figures, arrows and crossing things out do most of the work, and the ban on letters and numbers is what keeps it a drawing game. If one word fails round after round, take it off the list: a word nobody can get is not hard, it is a broken entry.