Ghost Ink

How to play

Ghost Ink is a drawing game with one cruel twist: your ink vanishes after every stroke. It needs at least three players and plays three rounds.

Each round, every player privately sees a secret prompt on their phone for a few seconds. Then you have 55 seconds to draw it. As soon as you lift your finger, the line you just drew disappears from your screen, so you are building the whole picture from memory. You will lose track of where the eyes were. Everybody does.

When the drawing time is over, the sketches are revealed head-to-head on the TV, two at a time, and everyone has 20 seconds to vote for the better one. Each vote your drawing receives is worth 100 points. After the reveals, the round scores appear, and after three rounds the highest total wins.

The fun is in the reveal. Nobody sees their own drawing until the TV shows it, so the artist is often just as surprised as the room. Faces with eyes on the forehead, houses floating above their own roofs and animals with eight legs are common, and every one of them gets a laugh.

Tips for hosts

• Tell everyone to draw in a few big, confident strokes instead of lots of small ones.
• Pick a starting point, such as the outline, and build outward from it to keep your bearings.
• It is a crowd favourite that works for people who claim they cannot draw. Nobody can, in this game.
• Pair it with Sketchy Whispers for a drawing-themed stretch of the night.

Best for

Best for: Anyone who thinks they are bad at drawing. Here, that is an advantage.

Play Ghost Ink

Open Sofa Showdown on a laptop or computer connected to your TV, choose Ghost Ink from the game shelf, and share the four-letter room code with your friends.

Play now Opens hosting on this screen. Nothing starts until you choose a game.

Related games

• Sketchy Whispers Write. Draw. Misunderstand entirely.
• Police Sketch Draw the suspect from a ridiculous witness description.
• Brush Troll One artist draws, one director ruins it, everyone else guesses.