· 6 min read
Games like Gartic Phone, but music
What makes Gartic Phone and Skribbl work as group games, why the music equivalents are mostly quizzes, and what a make-something-and-vote round sounds like.
If you have played Gartic Phone with a group you already know the shape of a good browser party game, and it is worth naming the parts — because the music-shaped version of it is much rarer than you would expect.
What Gartic Phone actually gets right
- Everybody makes something. Nobody is an audience member waiting for a turn.
- The skill floor is a stick figure. Being bad at it is funnier than being good at it, which means being bad at it is not a punishment.
- You work alone and see the results together. The reveal is the whole game; the drawing is just how you get material for it.
- It is a link. No account, no install, nothing to explain to the one person on a work laptop.
The third one is the load-bearing part. A game where everybody watches each other work has no reveal, and a game with no reveal is a task.
Why the music versions are mostly quizzes
Search for a musical Gartic Phone and you get song-guessing games. They are fine, and they are a different genre: you are recalling, not making. That makes them a trivia game with a soundtrack, and it inherits trivia's problem — the person who does not share the group's listening history simply loses, and knows it by round two.
The reason nobody built the making version for a long time is boring and technical. Drawing in a browser needs a canvas and a mouse. Making music in a browser needed audio scheduling accurate enough that a kick lands on the beat, which browsers were bad at until fairly recently — and if the kick is ten milliseconds late, everybody can hear it and nobody can say why.
The structure, translated
| Gartic Phone | The music version |
|---|---|
| A prompt everybody gets | A tempo everybody gets |
| A blank canvas | Eight empty bars |
| A drawing timer | Four minutes |
| You cannot see other drawings | You cannot hear other loops |
| The album at the end | Playback, one loop at a time |
| Laughing at the chain | Rating each one out of five |
The constraint doing the work in both is the shared starting point. Everybody drawing the same prompt is what makes the results comparable and therefore funny; everybody building on the same tempo does exactly the same job. Let people pick their own tempo and you get eight tracks that cannot be set beside each other — which is the musical equivalent of everybody drawing a different prompt.
The part that surprises people
The person who insists they are not musical usually does well. Partly because drums are a grid and a grid is not intimidating, but mostly because they are not trying to make it good — they are trying to make it land, which is the correct instinct for an eight-bar loop being judged by five friends in about twelve seconds.
Producers in the room tend to lose their first few rounds for the mirror-image reason. Four minutes is not enough to arrange, so the habit of building something proper works against you, and the person who just put a loud kick pattern down and moved on gets the votes.
Where to try it
GrooveArena runs this format. Two to eight people, a link to a private room, no account, no install. If you want the rules first, how to play is the whole thing on one page — it takes about a minute to read and the game takes six to play.
Four minutes is shorter than it sounds.
Play a round