Quick Draw iPhone app – Early thoughts: UPDATED

I managed to get into the beta for the new Quick Draw game for iPhone. It’s an online Pictionary or Win-Lose-or-Draw sort of game. While not the first online game for the iPhone, it’s definitely one of the first to have a very compelling design. It’s incredibly simple. You launch the app, create a name to play under, and log in. You can change the name by quitting and reopening the app, but it remembers your last used name so you don’t have to put it in every time.

Once you get into the game, you can either play offline or join one of the “category rooms”. Playing offline is okay if you just want to have a couple people look over your shoulder to draw and pass the iPhone around after each guess. But the real money comes from playing online.

The online rooms are broken up into categories like Animals, Characters, Food and Drink, and Landmarks. Animals was pretty easy (except for goose) and Landmarks was hit or miss on difficulty (Statue of Liberty is no problem, but Easter Island required the artist to actually spell out the word). Near as I can tell, there is no penalty for simply writing out the word that you need people to guess, but it makes the game less fun, so I doubt it’ll happen very often. Although, the one time someone did spell it out for me, the game crashed, so maybe that’s their anti-cheat system.

The game is not unstable by any means, and played very, very well, even over EDGE. There was, however, some lag over EDGE that I didn’t experience on 3G or Wi-Fi, but that is to be expected from time to time. One of the nicest features of the game is the ability to choose multiple colors and even an eraser so that you can really get into making your artwork stand out. Color makes a big difference on how easy your drawing can be perceived, though sometimes even color can’t help you (as you’ll see in my gallery below).

All in all, I found this to be a very enjoyable game and one that will really stand out when it is finished. There are only about 40 words in the beta, but when the full game is released, expect a lot more with new words added via updates. To check out some images of the game, you can visit the game’s homepage, or just check out my gallery below.

UPDATE: One of the developers left me a comment to explain a couple of points above.

First of all, on the subject of cheating:

“When someone spells out a word, other play[er]s have the option to click the ‘whistle’ icon in on their screen to says [sic] the drawer is cheating. If enough people press that button, the round is ended, no scores are kept for the round, and the drawer is told off!”

And on the subject of new words (which I had hoped would be the case, but did not want to speak out of turn):

“Updates will not be required to add new words to the game, we have made it so all words are on our servers, so we can add new words and new categories at any time without changing the application!”

Thanks, Rich!

I did much better in a different category. Honest.

Seriously?! How do you draw that on an iPhone?

I tried to draw Antonio Banderas with cat ears, but this worked better.

I got this one as soon as he drew a circle with a lightning bolt in it.