In the draw and guess game I make, every new table starts on a 100-second clock. That is a convenient number, because the scoring turns into plain arithmetic, and it makes a drawing game online easy to follow from the chat. This page is a lookup. Find the seconds left when someone typed the right word, find their place in the queue, and read off what they scored.
What is a guess worth on a 100-second clock?
Picture a floor and a slope. Every right answer starts at 100, and each second still on the clock adds 4 on top. The result goes to the nearest five. An instant guess scores 500, and a guess in the very last second scores 100.
- 90 seconds left: 460
- 80 left: 420
- 70 left: 380
- 60 left: 340
- 50 left: 300
- 40 left: 260
- 30 left: 220
- 20 left: 180
- 10 left: 140
- 1 left: 105
These are the speed points. They are the most a guess can earn at that moment, which only the first right answer gets in full.
How much does a place in the queue cost?
Each earlier right answer cuts what the next one keeps. The share is one divided by one plus four fifths of the number of people who got there first. In round figures the first answer keeps the lot, the second about 56 per cent, the third 38, the fourth 29 and the fifth 24. From the sixth place onward a guess keeps 20 per cent, and no lower.
Here is what that means with 70 seconds left, where the speed points are 380:
- First: 380
- Second: 210
- Third: 145
- Fourth: 110
- Fifth: 90
- Sixth and later: 75
And at 30 seconds left, where the speed points are 220: 220, 120, 85, 65, 50, then 45.
Does speed or place matter more?
Speed wins by a wide margin. Being second with 90 seconds left scores 255. Being first with only 20 seconds left scores 180. A quick answer mid-pack beats a lone answer near the buzzer, so type early, even if it is a gamble. A wrong guess carries no penalty.
What does the drawer earn?
The drawer is spared the order cut. Their pay is the average of the speed points earned by the other players, with each person who missed counting as zero. A sketch that the whole table reads quickly therefore pays as much as a quick guess.
Take six players, so five guessers. Four of them get it right, with 90, 70, 50 and 30 seconds left. The fifth never does. Their speed points are 460, 380, 300 and 220, which add up to 1,360. Divided by five other players, that is 272, rounded to 270. The guessers themselves score 460, 210, 115 and 65. If nobody had guessed, the drawer would have scored nothing.
Scores are added when the turn ends, and a turn stops early once every guesser is in.
Where do the hints fit in?
On the 100-second default, the three letter hints land with 75, 50 and 25 seconds left. At those moments a first guess is worth 400, 300 and 200. Waiting for a hint to be sure therefore has a known price: after the first hint, nobody can score more than 400 for that turn, and after the second, no more than 300.
The same shares hold on other clocks. If the host picks 40 seconds, a guess with 16 seconds left is 40 per cent of the clock and scores 260, exactly what 40 seconds left scores on the default. Only the number of seconds changes, never the proportion.
Check the figures in a live game
To see these numbers appear on screen, Boardit's Draw and Guess is a free drawing game online with friends, so you can open a table and watch the scores land after each turn.
The whole lookup in a sentence
A correct guess scores 100 plus 4 a second, trimmed by the order people got there, and the drawer collects the average of the speeds.
Ahmed Moaz builds Boardit, a free browser game site.
Top comments (0)