A Fake Artist Goes to New York is a five-to-ten-player party game where everyone takes turns drawing one short line on a shared sheet of paper. All but one player know the secret answer; one of them is secretly the Fake Artist, who knows only the topic and is trying to blend in. After two rounds of drawing, the players vote on who they think the Fake is. The Fake wins by surviving the vote and guessing the answer.

The game is excellent. The setup is tedious. Someone has to write down the topic, distribute paper slips with the answer (and one blank slip for the Fake), keep track of whose turn it is, decide when voting starts, run the vote, and reveal the result. The bookkeeping is half the friction.

This app does the bookkeeping.

What it does

Open the app on one phone, choose the number of players, pick a topic, pass the phone around. Each player taps once to see whether they are the Fake. The drawing canvas comes next: each player draws a single short line, the app advances to the next player, and so on for two rounds. Then voting. Then the reveal. No paper, no setup, no host who knows the answer and has to play the role of judge.

The whole game is one device passed around the table. No accounts, no servers, no network. The app is a state machine plus a canvas plus a topic list.

The choices

No multi-device sync. A version of this app could run as a host with one phone per player on the same Wi-Fi. I considered it and decided against it. Wi-Fi setup at a friend's house is the second most common failure mode for casual party tech (the first is "someone's app needs an update"). Passing one phone around is what people already do for the analog version of this game. The analog flow is the analog flow; the app respects it.

Drawing canvas without a brush engine. The drawing is intentionally crude. The game rewards short, ambiguous lines; smooth Bezier curves with pressure sensitivity would let the non-Fake players draw too well and give the Fake away. The canvas does the minimum: track pointer down, sample positions, connect them with a constant-width stroke. That is exactly what a finger on a phone can produce in two seconds, which is exactly what the game asks for.

Hardcoded topic list. Topics live in a single JSON file, organized by category (Animals, Movies, Foods, Sports, and so on). No backend, no editorial pipeline, no user submissions. Adding a topic is one line of code and a pull request. The topic list is small enough that this is cheaper than building a CMS.

Hybrid packaging. The project ships as a static SvelteKit site (the production deploy at fake-artist.ma-r-s.com), a Capacitor-wrapped Android/iOS app, and a Tauri-wrapped desktop binary. All three from the same source. The web build is the version most people will use; the native builds were exercises in figuring out how cleanly SvelteKit packages itself for non-web targets.

Status

Works. Plays through end to end. The single-device flow is solid; the drawing surface handles touch and mouse cleanly; the topic list is small but reasonable. The Capacitor builds compile but I have not put them through an app-store submission. Source on GitHub.

A Fake Artist Goes to New York is © Oink Games. This app is a non-commercial companion tool. Buy the physical game from Oink Games.