Guide To Drawings

Taken from The Sentence Game's Instructions Page:

No words! You can use single letters or numbers if absolutely necessary and if they don't give things away. Chemical formula are sometimes allowed, too. Essentially, if you feel that you are making things too easy, don't do it - it is hard to cheat in a game with no winners. On the other hand, if a few letters allow you to make an absolutely hilarious drawing, feel free to go ahead. Here are some examples:

• Writing "H20" is lame; everyone knows what it is and there are easy symbols for water. Writing "0=0" for oxygen is fine as it is quite geekier and there are not many good ways to symbolize molecular O2.
• Writing "MSG" = bad. Initials are cheating if that's the common name.
• Organizing complex sentences by numbering parts of your drawing is OK
• Complicated and ridiculous symbols are always better than letters or numbers
• Specific numbers are okay if the sentence requires them and drawing them would be tedious. If you are asked to draw 1003 spiders, you can put an x1000 by the third one.
• If you can't come up with a good way to symbolize someone, you can put a letter on their shirt or above their head. Well-known people should be limited to just one letter; rare and strange quasi-celebrities can get away with two letters. Try not to resort to letters too often.
• No Speech bubbles with actual speech. That's far less fun than speech bubbles that contain funny pictures. Be creative!
• Clip art is allowed... but not too much! Drawings are almost always funnier than clip art! Also, be sure to keep the cardinal rule above in mind: Don't make things too easy to guess! Part of the fun of the game comes from the challenge of making do with limited drawing skills. So with that in mind, don't use clip art to represent the thing you are using a picture of! So, if you're supposed to draw a picture of a donkey, DON'T use a clipart picture of a donkey. However, *drawing* a donkey or using a clipart picture of someone's backside would be fine (clothed please :-) and is likely to lead to further fun and confusion! If you're able to draw a perfect picture that causes a sentence to stay the same (see game 64), that's impressive and funny. If you do the same thing with clipart, it's lame and boring!
• These rules being said, I've seen some excellent and funny drawings that used full words -- but the words used were not hints in any way to the sentence, and the picture was hillarious! If this is the case, go ahead - just don't make it too easy and keep it funny.
  
  Good-natured sex, drugs, and violence is all part of the game, but you don't have to make your drawings too explicit. Keep your audience in mind. At the moment, there is no way to limit games on the site to a specific group of players. Think of the children!
  
  "Clean up" is allowed (but only in extreme cases!!) So, for example if you're supposed to draw a bear having sex with a goat, you can draw them having tea together, playing parcheesi, etc... HOWEVER, try to maintain as much of the sentence as you can -- see if just changing one word will clean it up.