cheap ticket: Draw Something

If you follow me on Twitter you'll know I love playing a game called "Draw Something". I used to see people mentioning it and didn't have a clue what everyone was going on about. This is a quick explanation plus an opportunity to stop clogging up your timelines with my "art work" by creating a little gallery of some of my favourite drawings.

The Game

The game is played on either an iPhone/iPad or an Android. It's downloadable as a free app (with mildly annoying adverts) or you splash out the heady sum of two squid to get the ad free version. It's possible to try it out for free first and upgrade without losing all your games.

Basically it's like Pictionary (remember that?) but on a phone, with colours, and with no time limit. You get a choice of 3 words and play against a single partner. You can find them on Facebook, by email or by asking a friend for their username. It's possible to play random strangers, but there are enough people on Twitter you talk to who will play it, and it's much more fun with an opponent you know.

You take turns; one person draws and the other guesses. You have a selection of letters when you're guessing and know the number of letters in the word. Therefore if you can do anagrams well it almost doesn't matter how bad the drawing is. The words are graded for difficulty: one coin ones are really simple (e.g. wink, or tree) and three coin ones can be as tricky as "hawk eye" or concepts like "insomnia".

You have to watch out for American spellings and words: terms come up I haven't even actually heard of on occasion. You can guess whilst the picture is being drawn or wait until the end. You get to watch a playback of what your opponent did when guessing if you want to, or can skip that bit.

Go Team Peter and Team Anya!

By guessing correctly you win coins which you can exchange for extra colours (which makes it much more fun) and "bombs" (used to remove letters when you're guessing, to select new words to draw, or to choose from special categories that have words worth up to nine coins). You do running wins - I'm currently up to 320 unbroken correct drawings with my indefatigable and brilliant pal Anya Palmer.

Popularity and Why I Love It

DrawSomething was a "phenomenon" when it was launched. Within 5 weeks of launching it had been downloaded 20 million times. 50 days on and it had achieved 50 million downloads.

In April 2012 it was sold to the games giant Zynga for $180 million... and immediately caused Zynga's stock price to drop by 50%. It seems many people had initially downloaded it, tried it out, got bored of the novelty, and left in their droves.

I however still *really* love it - and judging by the fact that I have over 30 games on the go at the moment with people from Twitter, I'm not the only one. If you are only drawing stick men in monochrome it will become dull very quickly, it is true. If you have fun with it, be a bit silly, and make your drawings pretty, it can be a brilliant distraction.

You can come back to a game whenever you like, so it's a great way of having a distraction for 5 minutes in the middle of the day. Go away for 2 weeks on holiday? No problem, you just pick up where you left off.

Gallery

Anyway, enough about the game: the real purpose of this is to show off some of my TOTALLY kick-ass drawings. I spend up to about 5 minutes on some of them and really enjoy doing all the detailing. I can't draw for crap with a pen and paper and am therefore amazed how these turn out with just my finger tip on a screen. You can select 4 sizes of "pen" and that's how you get the detail. I always draw the background first, then the actual thing I want my opponent/partner to guess.

There is also an excellent website I recommend called Crap Draw Something: just visit this link and/ or follow @crapdraw on Twitter.

"CUTE"