Seven games for two: the Versus tab
October 22, 2026
Sketchpad Arcade has had a Versus tab for about a day, and it already holds seven games. They are the games everyone has played on the back page of a notebook when the lecture ran long, and they are the first games on the site built from scratch rather than traced from a Beach Day Arcade twin.
The notebook classics
Tic-Tac-Doodle is tic-tac-toe, blue X against pink O. Doodle SOS is SOS on a 6×6 grid: finish S-O-S in a line and you score and go again, and one letter can finish two lines at once. Box Doodles is dots and boxes, 25 boxes so there are no ties, and the part where the long chains start changing hands is as tense as ever. Paper Boats is the hide-and-seek grid game with four folded paper boats on an 8×8 page, where a miss is a splash and a hit is a pencil X.
Three more this week
Connect Sketch drops coloured-pencil counters down a hand-drawn frame until somebody lines up four. Sketchers is checkers, with crowned pieces and a Hard bot that looks several moves ahead. Guess My Doodle is the odd one out: you draw a word on the page, your friend watches it appear line by line and guesses, then draws one for you. It is a team game, so the score belongs to both of you.
Three ways to play
Every Versus game has Play vs Friend, which means passing one phone back and forth. Paper Boats even asks you to hand it over between turns so nobody peeks at the other page. Every game except Guess My Doodle also has a bot on Easy, Medium and Hard, and the game remembers your record against it on your device. Easy is for little ones having their first go against a computer. Hard is a real opponent: the Tic-Tac-Doodle bot never loses, so a draw counts as a win, and the Box Doodles bot gives away as little as it can.
The third way is new. Tap Invite a friend and the game makes a six-letter code and a link you can text to someone. They open it and play pink, you play blue, and you take turns whenever you like, an hour or a day apart. There are no accounts, no names and no chat, and only the person you sent the link to can see the game. Your open games sit in Your Games with Friends on the home page so you can see whose turn it is. It works in six of the seven games; Paper Boats sits it out for now, because we have not yet found a way to keep each player's boats hidden from the other phone.
And one for the Word tab
Sketch with Friends arrived in the same batch. It is a crossword tile game on a sketchbook page, with seven paper letter tiles each, double and triple squares, a bot on three levels and Invite a friend. It lives under Word rather than Versus, but it is very much a game for two, and its word list is checked so nothing rude ever lands on the board.