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Exquisite.Monster – Telephone Pictionary with strangers and friends screenshot

Exquisite.Monster – Telephone Pictionary with strangers and friends

AuthorSwayworn
Playexquisite.monster
HN ThreadShow HN: Exquisite.Monster – Telephone Pictionary with strangers and friends
Sourcegithub.com/JonathanHarford/exquisite.monster
HN Points1
Date Added2026-03-03
Tagsmobile, browser, desktop, multiplayer, open-source

About​

If you come to my house for dinner, there is a non-zero chance I will try to get you to play my favorite party game: Eat Poop, You Cat! (aka Telephone Pictionary aka Telestrations aka Broken Picture Phone)

You've probably played it: The first player comes up with a sentence. The second player draws a picture of the sentence. The third player writes a sentence describing the picture, and so on. After all players have contributed, the full sequence is revealed.

Are there existing online implementations? Of course. But:

  • They all expect you to fingerpaint on your phone. It's hard to make great art that way! ExMo does have a drawing tool (it's expected), but players are encouraged to create their art however they like (past media include paper & pen, SculptrVR, collage, diorama, and Procreate) and upload a picture.

  • The best way to play is at a party with your friends, with each player writing a starting sentence on a piece of paper and then they all get passed around. Party Mode captures that experience (and is therefore the second-best way).

Stack: SvelteKit/TS, Supabase for database and file storage, Clerk for auth. I was using BullMQ for background jobs, but switched to just leaning on the database for a simpler stack. I used server-side events for notifications, but that meant keeping Vercel running constantly which is unnecessarily expensive; polling does the trick.