What we did
The icebreaker stage had two games: Hangman and "Sprint in one GIF". Now there is a third — Draw and guess.
One participant gets a word and draws it. Everyone else sees the line appear as it is being drawn — not the finished picture — and writes their guesses in the chat next to the canvas.
You can pick the game when you create the board, and switch it later from board settings — even while the icebreaker is already running.
How a turn goes
The host starts the round and hands the brush to someone. The word goes only to whoever is drawing; everyone else sees a mask of it — _ _ _ _ _.
The one drawing gets a plain set of tools: six colours, three brush sizes, an eraser, a fill, undo and a full wipe. If the team is stuck, they can open a letter of the word — up to half of it.
Everyone else types guesses. A wrong guess shows up in the chat as a normal message, so the team thinks out loud together. A correct one never appears — instead the chat says who got it and what the word was, and the turn ends there.
Then the brush goes to the next person. When it has been around everyone, the circle starts over: the game does not end on its own. The host decides when the team has warmed up enough and moves the board on to writing cards. The board timer works here too — start it, and the turn will close when it runs out.
Why it matters
Watching someone draw badly is a shortcut past the awkward first minute. Nobody has to be clever or say the right thing — the person with the brush is visibly struggling, everyone else is shouting guesses, and by the time the word is named the room sounds like a room again.
A drawing appearing stroke by stroke does something a finished picture cannot: the team reacts while it is happening. The first guesses come from half a line, they are usually wrong, and that is the fun part.
The game needs two people to work — one draws, one guesses — so it fits a pair as well as a full team.
