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Multiplayer & share links

Every Napkin board is a multiplayer surface. There's no "start a session" step: two people on the same sketch are already drawing together.

Workspace teammates

Anyone in your workspace who can see a sketch can open it and draw. While a board is shared live:

  • You see each other's cursors — named, in a per-person color — and every stroke, move, and restyle as it happens.
  • Undo stays personal. Your ⌘Z rewinds your own changes only; nobody's stroke disappears because someone else changed their mind.
  • Nothing is lost to a bad connection. If sync hiccups, a banner appears with a retry — your drawing is queued, not dropped.

Share links — for everyone else

A share link lets anyone join a specific board as an anonymous guest — no account, no sign-in, drawing within seconds of clicking.

  1. Click Share on the board

    The share dialog lists this sketch's active links and mints new ones.

  2. Pick the grant

    Can draw or View only — set per link, so you can hand different links to different audiences.

  3. Create and send

    You get a URL of the form napkin.zerowidth.ai/s/<token>. Paste it into Slack, an email, a meeting invite — access is the link itself.

The grants

Can drawgrant

The full drawing surface: pen, shapes, text, stickies, select, restyle, personal undo. Guests draw ink and shapes — workspace capabilities like image upload, reference cards, export, and sharing stay with members.

View onlygrant

Look, pan, and zoom — live, cursors and all — without the ability to change anything. Right for a stakeholder watching a working session.

Present onlygrant

Decks only: the link opens straight into the slideshow — slides in order, arrow keys and clicks to move, a fullscreen button, and nothing else. No canvas, no filmstrip. The deck stays live: edits land on the guest's screen as they happen. The link to send when the deck is the message.

Guest identities

Each guest gets an ephemeral identity — a generated name like Swift Marmot with its own cursor color, shown in their header and on their cursor so everyone knows who's who. It sticks for their browser session, and their strokes stay attributed to it on the board. Nothing else is collected: no email, no account, no profile.

Members follow links too

If a workspace member opens a share link, they're routed straight to the normal board view with their full member capabilities — a share link is a safe thing to post in a channel where members and outsiders mix; everyone lands in the right place.

Revoking a link

Open the Share dialog, find the link, click Revoke. It takes effect immediately: guests on that link lose access on their next action, and new visits get a "this link isn't active" message. What they drew stays on the board; revoking removes access only. Each link revokes independently, so you can cut the draw link and leave the view link standing.

Where to go next

3 min read