Broken Picture Telephone

Like the children's game called broken telephone or simply telephone, also known as Chinese whispers, Broken Picture Telephone relies on the breakdown of communications for entertainment value. Each player has a maximum of ten minutes to submit their description or drawing. Games persist on the BrokenPictureTelephone.com site until finished, so that players can join a game hours or even days after it was begun. In order to deter inappropriate user behavior, players must register using a valid email address. Games with mature content are flagged as such by users—either the player who added the mature content, or any other user who views the game—and users can opt not to be shown any games with content flagged as mature. == History ==

Broken Picture Telephone (BPT) was created by American indie developer Alishah Novin in 2007. After Jay Is Games published a review of the game in June of that year, the influx of new players temporarily overwhelmed the BrokenPictureTelephone.com servers even though the game had been migrated to new servers in anticipation of such an increase in site visitors. Problems with server load continued, along with some bugs in the game's code and issues with malicious users trolling games; Novin took the game offline in 2010; the website's content was replaced with a message saying that development was continuing to address the problems with the game's functionality. An Android app version of the game was released 13 October 2012, with the first bugfix release, numbered 1.01, following on 16 October. The browser version of the game remained defunct for several years until it was relaunched in 2013. == Reception ==

Broken Picture Telephone was rated #62 in PC Magazine list of the Top 100 Web Sites of 2009, and #5 in Jay Is Games's top ten games of 2009 in the Simple Idea category. Gamezebo praised the way its gameplay "tends to rapidly degenerate into hilarious misunderstandings" and called it "maybe one of the greatest online games ever." and Jay Is Games noted that site visitors "can spend a lot of time just browsing through the archives of completed games and laughing at the results." Numerous gaming-review sites lamented the 2010 shuttering of the game. == Similar games ==

Online multiplayer games with similar mechanisms of play, some of which were first released during the period when BPT was not available, include Broken Phone, DoodleOrDie, Drawception, DrawGuess, Interference and Teledraw. Commercial board game versions such as Telestrations and Cranium Scribblish existed by 2009. Gartic Phone While Onrizon Social Games' Gartic.io website launched in 2017, the company found massive success upon launching Gartic Phone in December 2020. Like BPT and similar games, it combines elements of Pictionary and Broken Telephone. In Gartic Phone, players sketch a word or phrase and pass it to the next player, who must guess what the drawing represents. The game continues in a loop until the final player compares the last sentence with the original starting sentence. It offers various game modes, including: Normal, Knock-Off, Animation, Crowd, and introduced several new modes in early 2023. Gartic Phone is accessible through its website and supports multiple languages, making it available on PCs, tablets, and smartphones with an internet connection. Similar to Jackbox Games party video games, Gartic Phone "Crowd" mode allows for audience voting via invite links. Since Gartic Phone success, Onrizon has developed spin-off games Gartic.TV and Gartic Show! ==Screenshots==