Web Video / Guess the Build

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Guess the Build (also titled Guess That Build, depending on the POV) is a collaborative Minecraft minigame series between mainly Grian, GeminiTay, ImpulseSV, Skizzleman, SmallishBeans, and SolidarityGaming. The series began on November 13th, 2023.

The minigame is effectively a game of build telephone (or, alternatively, Minecraft Telestrations). Players must build something based on a prompt within a time limit of usually five minutes, then move to adjacent plots to either guess a fellow player's prompt or construct a new build based on another player's prompt guess. In the end, all builds and prompts are revealed one by one to see how far each build chain has deviated from its original vision.

Note: Due to the fine line between the creators playing bits and the creators in real life, please focus on the in-series elements like builds and reactions, as opposed to the creators themselves.

This series provides examples of:

• Ambiguous Syntax:
  • Exploited in Jimmy's 2nd episode. In response to the guess prompt of "Skizzleman taking a poop", instead of actually building Skizz sitting on the toilet like everyone else, Grian instead builds Skizz holding a piece of poop that he took out from the toilet, complete with stink lines.
    Grian: I refuse to build him actually taking a poo!
  • In Skizz's 2nd episode, Grian's build chain revolves around a table "with" the legs of a mammal, but while Grian's original build is a table that has human legs in place of a normal table's legs, all later guesses involve a table with animal feet on the tabletop.
  • In Grian's 3rd episode, Jimmy interprets Grian's initial build as "crying person with a cool man with glasses in the back of his head". While Grian's build portrays the two being the same person, in which the "cool man with glasses in the back of his head" in question being the person's sentient hair, Impulse reinterprets the prompt as two people, one crying and the other wearing sunglasses backwards.
• Animate Inanimate Object: Many build chains across various episodes involve sentient/sapient inanimate objects, ranging from household appliances having a council meeting to musical instruments getting engaged to Minecraft blocks having coffee to giant cutlery eating people.
• Artistic License – Anatomy:
  • Skizz recurringly fails to build arms onto human/humanoid characters.
  • Many of the builds involving people or animals involve them having an unrealistic number of joints.
  • In Grian's 2nd episode, one of the factors that make Skizz's guess build in Jimmy's build chain an Epic Fail is the fact that one character's right arm is long enough to reach down to his ankles without bending or crouching down… while his left arm is a much more normal length.
    Jimmy: I can't get over the arm… It just keeps going down and down…
• Cardiovascular Love: Throughout the series, the red or pink Heart Symbol is usually used as shorthand for love (the concept or the word), oftentimes in a romantic context. The main exception to this is when a red heart appears in a row with a yellow heart and a green heart, in which Hearts Are Health and represent the Life SMP.
• Christmas Episode:
  • Episode 6 of the series from each of the perspectives revolves around a festive theme and was released shortly before Christmas 2024.
  • Episode 8 of the series from each perspective was released shortly before Christmas 2025 and similarly revolves around festive themes.
• Company Cross-References: Due to creator overlap, there are frequent mentions of Hermitcraft and occasionally the Life SMP, as well as fellow creators on the servers who are otherwise not part of the series.
  • In Grian's 3rd episode, Gem comments that she "has a lot of practice building snails at this point", referencing her and Grian's "chosen by snails" plotline on Hermitcraft, while Impulse's prompt is simply "Jimmy winning a life series" — which, given his reputation, is indeed an "unlikely scenario".
  • In Impulse's 3rd episode, Joel's prompt is "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but all of the dwarfs are ImpulseSV", a nod to Impulse's dwarf-themed builds in Hermitcraft Season 9.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Everyone's 1st episodes revolve around the same six builds and focus on their own individual prompts without the Switching P.O.V. characteristic of later episodes, resulting in repetitive episodes. Since then, in response to viewer feedback, the format has changed so that every person's episode is completely unique, and shows everyone’s builds at the end of the episode.
  • The 1st episode also adds a bonus round in which players only have one minute to complete their builds, as opposed to the standard five minutes. This doesn't occur in any other episode, with the creators acknowledging throughout the round that 60 seconds is generally nowhere near enough time to complete a build.
• Exact Words: Words having more than one meaning has resulted in prompt miscommunication and derailment across the game on multiple occasions.
  • In the 1st episode, Jimmy's prompt is "A duck with really long legs jumping on a diving board into a pool." Gem then guesses the build prompt to be "Long legged chick diving into a pool"… which Impulse reinterprets to be a woman with long legs on a diving board.
    Impulse: Not that kind of chick. Whoops!
  • In Grian 2nd episode, he is supposed to build himself with bubble gum in his hair. However, Skizz misspelling Grian's name as 'Giran' results in Grian refusing to actually build his Minecraft avatar accurately and instead building a derpy version of himself with asymmetrical eyes and an orange shirt with a red collar (instead of a fully red shirt), saying that it's an off-brand version of himself who's "slightly like [him] but a bit different".
  • In Jimmy's 2nd episode, Gem guesses Grian's "house made of art supplies" to be "a menagerie of shapes and colours in a tent shape", using the less common definition of "a strange and diverse collection of people or things" for the word 'menagerie'. Joel, receiving this guess prompt, proceeds to use the more common definition of the word — a zoo.
• Every Pizza Is Pepperoni: In part due to time constraints and the blocky limitations of Minecraft, most of the builds that involve pizza default to yellow toppings with red spots on it, or otherwise stick to a red and yellow colour palette for its toppings. The only times this isn't the case are in Joel's 4th episode, where Grian comments that his pizza doesn't look much like a pizza, which Joel responds by randomly adding two orange chunks of "pineapple" due to not having enough time to rebuild it; and Grian's 5th episode, where Impulse forgets what a pizza looks like and somehow just builds a light flesh-tone baked crust and buttons for toppings scattered over its surface, which Jimmy miraculously guesses to be what it's intended to be.
• Flawless Victory: Every once in a while, the initial prompt of a build chain manages to stay more or less preserved throughout the entire chain without any major deviations — not just the builds themselves, but the wording of the prompts as well. So far, examples include SpongeBob changing a car tyre, Jimmy winning a season of the Life series, and a dog peeing in a pool.
• Fractured Fairy Tale: Impulse's 3rd episode is themed around "fairy tales, but cursed", resulting in increasingly strange reinterpretations of classic fairy tales.
• Informed Species: Due to time, medium, and skill constraints, several creators' animal builds don't look much like the taxa they're supposed to be, with particularly egregious examples resulting in in-universe Viewer Species Confusion.
• It's All About Me: Joel's 3rd episode had it themed about Joel himself.
• Literal Metaphor:
  • In Gem's 2nd episode, her "mermaid fishing for compliments" involves the mermaid literally using a fishing rod to fish out hearts with compliments (e.g. "you are so hot") written on them.
  • In Skizz's 2nd episode, Impulse's initial prompt is someone literally "crying over spilt milk".
  • In Grian's 3rd episode, Skizz's initial prompt is "In a classroom for Minecraft, Etho is the teacher's actual pet", i.e. Teacher's Pet taken literally.
  • In Martyn's rendition of Episode 4, Gem and Martyn's initial prompt is a tiger literally trying to earn its stripes by going for a gold medal in a karate contest, for which striped fur is the prize.
• Iconic Outfit: Given the nature of the minigame, players often draw on signature outfits or physical characteristics to convey a character's identity in a build.
  • In fairy tales, characters' appearances are usually — or eventually become — a Shout-Out to their Disney animated adaptations, e.g. most mermaids in the series are redheads with greenish tails.
  • Within the Minecraft Multiverse, creator-characters are usually recognizable by certain characteristics: Bdubs' moss cloak and clock, Grian's red jumper, Jimmy's blond hair and blue jacket, Joel's Shrek outfit and green hair dye streak, Lizzie's pink hair, Mumbo's moustache (and to a lesser extent, his suit), etc.
• Little Green Men: Most depictions of aliens in the builds are a stereotypical green colour, though the size may vary. Conversely, several of the recurring blob creature builds have been reinterpreted as aliens.
• Oddball in the Series: The creators played a mixed in-person and in-game version at the 2025 Hermitcraft Gamers Outreach charity stream, which Grian posted an edited version of to his second channel, which could roughly be described as "Episode 7". A canonical Episode 7 would be released a couple of months later.
• Playing Pictionary: Zig-Zagging Trope on a wide scale. While some of the builds are easily reflective of their prompts, others are decidedly more abstract or significantly less well-rendered (due to a lack of time or skill), meaning that build prompts are often not accurately guessed. Similarly, guess prompts may also be misinterpreted in builds due to Ambiguous Syntax, Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure, or in some rare cases, deliberate sabotage. All of these can cause build chains to quickly go off the rails from the initial prompts they are supposed to be portraying.
• Please Put Some Clothes On:
  • During Impulse's 2nd episode, Skizz accidentally builds "Grian doing pottery next to his pottery collection" without wearing any clothes, due to only having built Grian's head at first and adding his body at the last second using the same block he used for Grian’s skin. Cue Grian being horrified by this and the mad scramble from just about everyone to build some clothes on once the build is revealed.
  • In Joel's 3rd episode, Impulse guesses a build to be "Joel's pants knocked off by a soccer(football) ball" [sic]… so predictably, Skizz builds Joel without any trousers on. Grian immediately rushes to add some trousers onto the build as Joel tries to rush through the guess prompt to get it over with.
    Joel: Put some pants on that man! Get us out of here!
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: A recurring trend contributing to prompt distortions in the series is the failure to understand pop cultural references made by the preceding builder(s), in part due to the varying ages and nationalities of the people playing. Gem in particular is notorious for this.
  Gem: We're in trouble here^note in Impulse's movie-themed episode for the 2025 Christmas Episode, 'cause I don't actually know any movies, ever.
• Prehensile Hair:
  • In Episode 1, Grian's interpretation of the guess prompt "Rapunzel benchpressing her new PB" depicts Rapunzel lifting weights with both her arms and her long hair.
  • Grian's prompt for his 3rd episode is that "Jimmys hair becomes sentient and it's cooler than he is", which he depicts as wearing Cool Shades, having its own fancy hair-do, and giving a thumb's up.
• Running Gag:
  • There are many jokes about kicking one of the cast members out of the series for their sub-par building or guessing skills in an episode.
  • Interpretations of various creator-characters in builds are quite consistent throughout the series: anyone with a red shirt is Grian; anyone with blond hair (generally built out of yellow terracotta) and a blue shirt is usually Jimmy (and even the shirt colour is optional); anyone wearing green is Joel (with some exceptions, though he's also recognized by his green hair dye streak); anyone with a moustache is Mumbo, etc.
  • At some point, there's always a build that fails to incorporate a person's hair, thus depicting them as bald.
  • Similarly, Skizz's constant failure to build arms on a person (or humanoid in general).
    Gem: Now, Skizz, this is a new trick for you: you see how you give people arms?
  • Several people repeatedly simplifying small-scale humans in their builds to resemble the Thumb-Thumbs from Spy Kids.
  • Due to Company Cross-References, many non-participant fellow creators repeatedly make "guest appearances" in the series through the participants' builds, especially Mumbo.
  • After the first couple of episodes, it is repeatedly lampshaded that green humanoid blob creatures — whether they be zombies, frogs, Shrek, Little Green Men, goblins or gremlins, or anything else — show up in builds every other episode, resulting in repeated jokes about banning the colour green (especially in the form of green and lime terracotta blocks) from future episodes to prevent this.
    Grian: How does this specific build keep happening?!
  • Ever since Grian's 3rd episode, Skizz's infamous Among Us-style Etho build has shown up in various builds.
  • Conversed in Jimmy's 3rd episode, in which all builds are themed around each person's pet peeves. Jimmy's build is based on the recurring gag that Grian is always late to his livestreams due to a usually nonsensical excuse. Grian's build uses almost exactly the same prompt, except with Swapped Roles.
• Shout-Out:
  • Due to his Minecraft skin being himself with Shrek's clothes (and his old skin actually being the character), several of the builds involving Joel across the series involve Shrek as a character.
  • The invocation of pop-culture references is discussed by Grian in the series, saying that if someone builds a character from popular media, the build will be interpreted to be said character, and later remarking on the importance of making characters recognizable.
• Stating the Simple Solution: In Impulse's 7th episode, Skizz tries to build a grandfather clock and ends up using a stick for the clock face. Gem asks him why he didn't just use an in-game clock.
  Skizz: [in a tone suggesting this is a genuine revelation] Oh, yeah!
• Switching P.O.V.: Other than the first episode, each episode swaps between every player's perspective to fully capture their thought processes and experiences throughout the rounds.
• Take That!: When Joel has to build a "hole of lies" in Grian's 7th episode, he puts up signs with lies written on them on the inside of the hole, including "Paul Blart: Mall Cop was a good film" and "Game of Thrones had a good ending".
• Toilet Humour: Build prompts involving toilets and/or waste (pee or poop) pop up every few episodes in the series, often to the exasperation of everyone, especially Gem and Grian.
• Tripping Before the Finish Line: There have been several instances where a player messes up the build chain at the very last guess.
  • At the end of the second round in the 1st episode, Joel starts ragging on Jimmy for guessing his build in Skizz's build chain to be a "cookie superhero" instead of a pizza because this misstep results in an imperfect build chain at the very last stage it could have messed up.
  • Joel's build chain in Impulse's 3rd episode is near-perfect and would have made it all the way through if Impulse hadn't somehow mixed up Snow White and Cinderella at the final guess.
  • Grian and Jimmy's build chain in Martyn's rendition of Episode 4 is nearly flawless, if it weren't for the fact that Gem missed the bowling alley that indicated that it was an arcade, causing Martyn to guess that the build is "Etho collecting Skizz gacha-pon toys".
• Viewer Species Confusion: In-universe, due to time and medium constraints, several creators' builds are reinterpreted to be different species from what their original prompts specified.
  • Downplayed in one instance. In the 1st episode, Jimmy builds a duck with yellow feathers (implicitly a duckling), which Gem guesses to be a chick, as in a baby chicken — which isn't too far off from the original vision, but results in the build quickly derailing.
  • In Impulse's 2nd episode, everyone can agree that Joel's initial prompt is Impulse as a four-legged mammal, but no one can agree on exactly what he's supposed to be — the initial prompt says he's a sheep, but guesses include ravagers, dogs, and cats.
  • A plant example occurs in Gem's 3rd episode, where Skizz's tomato is guessed to be an apple by Grian, whereas Joel guesses Gem's banana pepper to be a banana due to her building it to be yellow.
  • In Grian's 3rd episode, Jimmy's attempt to build a koala is guessed to be a mouse by Impulse.
  • Several in Impulse's 3rd episode:
    • In Gem's build chain, Impulse reinterprets the wolf in her initial build to be a mouse, which follows along until Jimmy's final guess that the character in question is a whale.
    • In Impulse's build chain, the goose is soon reinterpreted to be a stork, and finally, a pelican.
• Write What You Know: Invoked in Impulse and Joel's 5th episodes, in which all of the initial builds are themed around an anecdote from each creator's personal life — a school experience for the former, and a positive moment for the latter.