Here are some hints for how to do well in this game.
Some people think drawing is harder than describing, and others think describing is harder. For sketching, it is best to use a stylus, but people routinely make decent drawings with a mouse or a trackpad (it just takes longer). The most important thing to keep in mind when drawing is to avoid adding unnecessary detail.
When describing, pay attention to things like the direction of lines, how many objects there are, and how things are related. For example, consider this delicious sketch:
A bad
description of this sketch is something like "an ice cream cone".
It's bad because it doesn't give somebody else enough information to
recreate it very well.
Here's a better description: "A two-scoop ice cream cone in one of those pointy-bottomed waffle cones. There are four diagonal lines on the cone for texture, and both scoops are bumpy like clouds." This still isn't a perfect description, but it is probably good enough to get somebody to recreate the original drawing pretty well (which leads to a better score for everybody involved).
Here are some guidelines for how to rate the similarity of two sketches. This is kind of a subjective process, and two intelligent people can disagree if a sketch should be rated 3/5 or 4/5. That's why we ask lots of people to rate the same pair of sketches multiple times!
But we can add some vaguely objective rules to give people a better idea of how other people might also rate a pair. Check out the following table:
| Rating | Guideline | Example(s) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 / 5 | They are obviously not the same object or scene, or you can't tell what's going on. Maybe one of the sketches is defaced. |  |
| 2 / 5 | They are probably sketches of the same thing but they share few important similarities. |  |
| 3 / 5 | They are sketches of the same thing and they share some important features, but the way the sketches are composed is different. |  |
| 4 / 5 | They are definitely sketches of the same thing, they share major visual features. The way various parts relate to each other is also consistent. Where there are three of something in one, there are three of something in the other. |  |
| 5 / 5 | They are obviously a sketch of the same thing and there are few differences (major or minor) between them. These are pretty rare. |  |