There’s a particular kind of silence that falls over the table when someone draws a suspiciously vague squiggle. Not the silence of confusion, but the charged hush of collective doubt. Eyes narrow. Someone stifles a laugh. And suddenly, the game is no longer about lines or shapes; it’s about trust, intuition, and the art of pretending.
A Fake Artist Goes to New York is our Game of the Month for August 2025. The game was designed by Jun Sasaki and published by Oink Games, publishers of a previous game of the month, Scout. It is a social deduction party game that sees players drawing a collaborative image based on a prompt. This is done one line at a time, as players pass the paper around until each player has taken two turns with the uniquely-coloured pen. The thing is, one player does not know what the group is trying to draw, and must hide this fact. They win if they are not caught. They also win if they are caught, but can, in response, guess the prompt word. This means that players need to be subtle and not too obvious in their drawing. They need to show just enough to signal to the others that they know the prompt, but not enough to make the prompt explicit to the fake artist.
A Fake Artist Goes to New York thrives in the liminal space between clarity and chaos. On the surface, it’s simple: one player doesn’t know the word, and everyone else is trying to catch them. But the real magic lies in how that premise unfolds; how a single stroke can shift the mood of the room, how a well-timed bluff can earn admiration or suspicion, and how the act of drawing becomes a kind of social performance.
It took me a while to get around to this game. It needs at least 5 to play, and it was never to hand the few times we had enough people. When south over the summer, I played it first with family and then other groups. Annoyingly, I rarely had my phone on me or the wherewithal to take pictures. Woops!
Still, I can vouch for the game, even if I can’t show it. A Fake Artist Goes to New York is, like most of Oink’s titles, quick to teach and endlessly replayable. What’s different to most Oink games is that it feels more personal; it invites players to reveal themselves in unexpected ways. The confident strategist might falter when asked to draw a “giraffe” with one line. The quiet observer might suddenly become the most convincing fake artist of the night. And the group, as a whole, learns to read each other not just through gameplay mechanics, but through tone, timing, and the subtle language of shared creativity.
What makes Fake Artist uniquely resonant is its refusal to reward certainty. Unlike other deduction games where logic reigns supreme, here ambiguity is the currency. You’re never quite sure if the person drawing that oddly shaped triangle is bluffing, avoiding giving away the prompt, or just bad at drawing. And that uncertainty is where the game lives; where laughter erupts, where accusations fly, and where the most memorable moments are born.
We’ve had rounds where the fake artist guessed the word correctly and won, despite having been caught. We’ve had drawings so abstract they sparked vicious debates. And we’ve had players who, at risk of being caught, attempted to convince everyone they were just “trying something avant-garde.” Each session becomes a kind of gallery; part comedy, part mystery, part communal art experiment.
A Fake Artist Goes to New York feels like a celebration of ambiguity, a playground for social intuition, and a reminder that sometimes, the best stories come from the lines we don’t quite understand.
That’s a solid recommendation from me!
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