skribbl.io Private Room Settings: What Each One Does

Making the room

Click Create Private Room on the start screen and you become the host of an empty room. The Invite button copies a link; anyone who opens it joins immediately, and the game will not start until you press Start!. The settings panel only shows for the host and only before the match begins, so decide the rules while people are trickling in.

The settings

Players caps the room, from 2 to 20. A new private room starts at 8, which is a good size; beyond ten, each round takes a long time because every player draws once per round. The game will not start with fewer than two people.

Language chooses the built-in word list from 28 languages. In a private room it matters only if you are not using custom words exclusively.

Draw time is the artist's clock, 80 seconds by default, with options from 15 to 240 seconds. Forty to fifty suits a room that has played before; keep the default for first-timers or the guessers sit through a lot of dead air.

Rounds is how many times every player draws, from 2 to 10, and 3 by default. Each player draws once per round, so with six people and 80-second turns three rounds can run past twenty minutes if words go unguessed. Two rounds or a shorter draw time keeps a big room moving.

Word count is how many words the artist chooses from, one to five, three by default. Three is the sweet spot: enough to avoid an undrawable word, not so many that picking eats the clock.

Hints sets how many letters get revealed during a turn, zero to five. Two is the default. Zero makes the game about the drawing; five makes it a hangman race.

Game mode has three options: Normal, Hidden and Combination. Normal shows the word as underscores with hints filling in letters. In Hidden mode the guessers see WORD HIDDEN instead of the blanks, which is a real handicap for them.

Custom words

Paste a comma-separated list into the custom words box. The box asks for at least 10 words, each 1 to 32 characters long. With Use custom words only ticked, the round draws only from your list; unticked, your words are mixed into the built-in list. This is how the game becomes a vocabulary lesson, a film quiz or a night of inside jokes that nobody outside the room could guess.

Kicking and reporting

Click a name in the player list to Votekick, Mute or Report that player. The room owner can also Kick or Ban outright, and nobody can votekick the owner. Use these on anyone who writes the word on the canvas; the game will not always catch it for you.