Every drawing game design has to handle the same failure: a player is handed a word they cannot draw, and the turn dies. There are two ways to design word choice in a drawing game against that. You can curate the list until every word is drawable, or you can let the drawer choose from several. I build Draw and Guess, a drawing game, and it does both: a built-in list that is deliberately easy, and a choice of two to five words each turn. Here is the arithmetic for why the second layer matters, and what it costs.
Curating a drawing game word list only gets you so far
If you are working out how to build a word list for a drawing game, curation is the first layer. A curated list removes the words that are hard for nearly everyone, such as rare jargon or long phrases. It cannot remove words that are hard for this particular drawer. A famous app is easy for one player and meaningless to another. A local food is obvious in one country and a mystery in the next. Drawing games online played with friends from different countries meet this all the time.
Only the drawer knows their own gaps, and they know it in a second or two. That is the case for choice, and a general rule of player choice in game design: hand the last cut to the one person with the information.
How many words should a drawer choose from?
Suppose a share q of the list is unworkable for a given drawer, and words are dealt independently. The chance that every offered word is unworkable is q to the power of the number offered.
| Words offered | q = 10% | q = 20% |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 10% | 20% |
| 2 | 1% | 4% |
| 3 | 0.1% | 0.8% |
| 5 | 0.001% | 0.03% |
These q values are assumptions, not measurements. Even so, the shape holds for any q. A single word leaves a fixed share of turns doomed. A second option cuts that share by a factor of 1/q, and each extra word helps less in absolute terms than the one before.
What choice costs: the word choice timer
Choosing is not free. Hick's law, from W. E. Hick's 1952 paper on choice reaction time, describes decision time growing with the logarithm of the number of options. Going from two options to five more than doubles the information to process, from 1 bit to about 2.3.
In my game the choosing slice is fixed. At the shortest settings a turn takes at most 58 seconds: 12 to choose, 40 to draw and 6 for the result. Choice already costs about a fifth of that turn. Offering five words does not add seconds, but it fills the same seconds with more reading.
A fallback when a player times out
Any choice screen needs a rule for the drawer who doesn't decide in time. There are three common options: deal one of the offered words, deal a fresh word from the list, or skip the drawer. The first is the safest of the three, because it keeps the turn inside the offer. All three show why the curated list still matters. A drawer who freezes is protected only by how good the worst offered word is.
Easy vs hard words: difficulty levels or a flat list?
One common design tags words easy, medium and hard and pays more for the hard ones. My list has no tiers. The scoring pushes drawers towards easy words instead. Drawers are paid from how quickly their guessers answer, averaged over the rest of the table. So a sketch most of the table gets early pays at least as much as one only a single guesser cracks.
You can try that scoring on playboardit.com.
If you want to rate word difficulty with data rather than taste, there is a public dataset for it. Google Creative Lab's Quick, Draw! dataset holds 50 million drawings across 345 categories. Each drawing records whether the game recognised the word. A recognition rate per word is a rough difficulty score you can sort by, and the simplest way I know to test drawing words with data before players ever see them.
What I haven't measured about word choice in a drawing game
I have not measured which words drawers skip, or which drawings get guessed. I built the game on 15 September 2026, and my list was chosen by judgement, not by recognition data. The table above shows why choice helps. It does not show how often my players actually need it.
Ahmed Moaz builds Boardit, a free browser game site.
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