What is Retusch?

A drawing game where being recognised loses

Retusch is an online drawing game for 2 to 10 players. Each round hands you an illustration with one square erased, and you have to repaint it so it blends into the artwork. Then everyone looks at the retouched paintings and hunts for the repainted squares.

What sets it apart fits in one sentence: winning means not being seen.

What it shares with Gartic Phone

The shape is the same: you open a link, type a nickname, and play. No account, no install, no client to download. The game runs in the browser and a session starts in seconds. You invite friends by pasting a link into a conversation, and the table fills up.

The rhythm is familiar too: short rounds, a clock, a drawing phase and then a phase where you discover what the others produced. And above all, that collective reveal at the end of a round where everyone comments on what they see. It is the same group pleasure.

As in Gartic Phone, being good at drawing is not required. A well placed square of sky beats a masterpiece that spills over.

What it borrows from Meccha Chameleon

Underneath, though, the mechanic sits elsewhere. In Meccha Chameleon, a three dimensional game on Steam, you paint your own character and then place them in a scene hoping nobody can tell them apart from their surroundings. Victory comes from resemblance and good placement, not from action.

Retusch takes that idea and brings it back to the image. You do not choose where to hide, the game hands you the square; on the other hand you build everything that goes into it. The hiding place works if the eye slides over it without stopping.

And as in any camouflage game, the tension comes from the double role. You are hidden and hunter at the same time: while you scan the painting for a suspicious patch, somebody is scanning yours.

What exists nowhere else

The scoring rewards both camps in opposite ways. The hunter scores more the faster they find; the artist scores more the longer their square resists. A patch nobody sees earns its author the maximum.

That produces a very particular way of playing: you are not trying to make something beautiful, you are trying to make something right. Picking the correct colour, continuing a line in the right place, leaving no corner empty. These are acts of observation before they are acts of drawing.

The easiest way to understand it in practice is to read the full rules, or to start a quick game: it launches with no settings and no waiting.