The classic, done straight. A word is hidden behind blanks, you guess one letter at a time, and six wrong guesses finish the drawing without you. The category is always on screen — in hangman that is the fairness dial, and hiding it does not make the game harder so much as arbitrary.
The goal
Reveal every letter of the hidden word before you spend six wrong guesses. A letter you get right fills in every place it appears at once, so a well-chosen guess can open half the word. A letter that isn't there costs you one of your six and draws another piece of the figure.
The six
Six wrong guesses, six pieces: head, body, two arms, two legs. The status line counts them down for you in words — "4 wrong guesses left" — and the row of dots beside it shows the same thing at a glance, so you never have to count limbs to know where you stand.
Only wrong guesses cost anything. There is no clock, no penalty for thinking, and guessing a letter you have already tried does nothing at all — it can't cost you a life twice.
Controls
- Tap a letter On the on-screen keyboard. Letters you've used go dim; wrong ones are struck through in red.
- Type a letter A–Z on a physical keyboard does the same thing.
- Enter / Space Once the round is over, moves to the next word.
- Esc Opens the mode and word-set sheet.
- ↻ New word, same settings.
- ▦ The sheet: mode, word set, and the button that clears your tally.
The word sets
Ten themed sets, over a thousand words, every one written for this game rather than lifted from a published list:
Pick one, or pick Random and draw from all of them — in which case the tag at the top of the screen still tells you which set the current word came from. Every word is a single everyday noun, A–Z only: no spaces, no hyphens, no proper nouns, and nothing shorter than five letters or longer than eleven.
Words are dealt from a bag, not rolled fresh each time. A set plays all the way through before any word in it comes back, so a short session never hands you the same word twice and never opens with the one you just had.
The three modes
Versus the computer
The everyday game: it picks the word, you guess it, and it keeps a running tally — wins, losses, your current streak, and the best streak you've managed. Unlimited, so it is the mode to play when you just want another word.
Daily
One word a day, and every player gets the same one. It is worked out from the date rather than handed down from a server, so two people on opposite sides of the world open the page and see the same word without anything being sent anywhere. A new one arrives at midnight UTC.
The daily has its own record — played, won, current streak, best streak — kept separately from the versus-computer tally, because one word a day and forty words an afternoon are not the same achievement. The category counts as the hint here: it is hidden until you ask for it, and asking is a choice you make once per word.
The order is a fixed shuffle of every word in every set, so consecutive days are unrelated words from unrelated categories, and no word can return until all the others have had their turn. At over a thousand words that is a cycle measured in years, not months.
2 Player
Pass & play on one device. One of you types a word into a masked field — it shows as dots while you type, with a peek button if you need to check your own spelling — and can add a short hint if they're feeling generous. Then the phone changes hands: a hand-off screen sits in the way so the guesser never sees the setting screen, and the round starts when they say they're ready.
Words are 3–14 letters and the hint is up to 18 characters. A Swap button changes who is setting, and the scoreboard tracks both the round outcomes (solved and stumped) and the people, so it still reads correctly however many times you trade roles.
The setter's keyboard is genuinely separate. While the entry sheet is open, letters you type go into the word and are never played as guesses against it — which is the one bug that would ruin the mode.
Hints
Where a round has a hint — the typed one in two player, the category in the daily — it stays hidden behind a Show hint button until you ask. Once taken, it stays visible in the bar at the top as a reminder that you took it. Hiding it and then printing it permanently in the status strip would have made the button pointless.
Tips
Spend a vowel or two, then stop
E, A and O between them open most words, and the shape they leave is usually enough to work from. But vowels are also the guesses most likely to be everywhere or nowhere, so once you have two or three placed, the pattern is worth more than another vowel.
Read the blanks, not the alphabet
Guessing straight down A, B, C is how you lose. Once a couple of letters are placed, look at where they sit: a letter in the second position with a gap in front of it, a double letter near the end, an eight-letter word ending in a lone blank. English has fewer shapes than it looks.
Let the category do its work
It is on screen for a reason. Six letters in Food & Drink and six letters in Jobs & Trades are different problems even before you've guessed anything. The set is the difference between a puzzle and a coin flip.
Consonant clusters are cheap information
R, S, T, N and L turn up constantly and rarely turn up alone. If you have a blank that must be part of a cluster — a gap before a final vowel, or two gaps together in the middle — these are the ones to spend.
Count what's left before the last guess
When you're down to one wrong guess and one or two blanks, stop and read the whole word out. More rounds are lost to a reflex guess with the answer already on screen than to a genuinely hard word.
Good to know
- Your settings and your records are saved on your device. Three separate records are kept — versus the computer, the daily, and two player — and a button in the setup sheet clears the tally.
- No account, and nothing is sent anywhere. The daily word is computed from the date on your own device, not fetched. Clearing your browser data clears your records and your settings.
- Plays on a phone, a tablet or a desktop, in portrait or landscape, with no install.