Cool word games
Online Word Games | Tons of Free Word Scrambles and Puzzles
Play these free Coolmath Games word puzzles. Whether you're unscrambling words or playing a word finder, you might want to keep a dictionary handy.
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Hangman
Play the classic game with your friends!
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Word Search
Choose your category and find the hidden words!
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Word Race
Compete against your friends in the word search arena!
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Grabble
A delightfully ruthless word game!
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Daily Crossword
Solve a new hand-crafted puzzle every day.
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Unolingo
You'll need to use all 26 letters... but only once.
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Up and Down Words
Solve the word pairs to complete the chain.
Hangman
Play the classic game with your friends!
Hang on to your balloons! Guess the letters to solve the word puzzle and stay alive. Join a quick game to play online, or set up a private game to play with your friends.
Word Search
Choose your category and find the hidden words!
Choose your category and find the hidden words. Think you're a super word sleuth? Try the ultra-hard maniac mode!
Word Race
Compete against your friends in the word search arena!
Compete against your friends in the word search arena! Find words in all directions in this multiplayer word search.
Grabble
A delightfully ruthless word game!
Make your own words, and steal from your opponents! No words are safe in this ruthless game of anagrams.
Daily Crossword
Solve a new hand-crafted puzzle every day.
Put down the newspaper and solve a new hand-crafted crossword every day. Find words down and across in this classic word-guessing game.
Unolingo
You'll need to use all 26 letters... but only once.
Use each letter in the alphabet exactly once to solve this special crossword puzzle. There are no hints so you'll have to really use your vocabulary!
Daily Jumble
Unscramble the words to solve the riddle!
First unscramble the words, then solve the riddle. How quickly can you do it?
Up and Down Words
Solve the word pairs to complete the chain.
Each puzzle has seven word pairs. Work up and down the puzzle to solve each pair and complete the chain!
Play Four
A fast-paced word puzzle!
Solve four letter words running across and down.
It's like a mini crossword puzzle!
Misspelled
Turn words into magic spells!
Don't say the magic words, spell them! Type out commands to cast magic spells and reach the goal.
Word Detector
Unscramble the letters to find hidden words!
R-T-A: Can you make four words using these letters? Tons more puzzles inside!
Word Surge
Find words that match the theme.
Can you find all the words? Every level has a visual clue and a new theme to solve.
Word Worm
Spell your way down the tower!
The word worm is trapped atop a tower of letters! Think fast and put your vocab to the test to help it reach the bottom.
Candy Word
Crush cakes, spell words, and score big!
S-W-E-E-T! Can you ace this sugary spelling test? Match cakes, spell words, and use power ups to score big points and complete the objectives.
Words Family
How's your vocab? Fill the grid with words!
S-P-Y.
..Can you spell a word for every row? You need a big vocabulary to get through all thirty-nine levels.
Words Party
Come on into the spelling party!
Come on into the spelling party! Every level has something to say. Place all the letters correctly to read the message!
Whether you're unscrambling words or playing a word finder, you might want to keep a dictionary handy. These word games will have your mind racing to try and tap into your English skills. Whether it’s competing against your friends in Word Race, or adding some magic to the playlist in Misspelled, you are sure to have a fun time in our Word Games Playlist.
Are word games fun?
Of course they are! While the concept of word games might sound kind of dull, take a second to think about all the kinds of great word games that you played growing up. Games like Word Search and Hangman are absolute classics that almost everyone has played and loved!
Are there any variations of word games on this playlist?
There are plenty of riffs on word games on our Word Games Playlist! Pretty much all of our playlists on Coolmath Games have fun spins on the ordinary genre, and the Word Games Playlist is no exception.
Several titles are more like regular games that happen to have words as a part of them. As mentioned before, the game Misspelled is a game where you use magic to get through the levels. By spelling words correctly, you will be rewarded with abilities like extra platforms and more jumps. A few other games like this include Candy Word and Word Worm, both of which make spelling a whole lot more fun than you would think possible.
Maybe best of all, word games will improve your spelling without it feeling like school. Getting to learn while having fun can often be difficult, but word games are a great way to learn in an exciting way. Who knows, maybe playing something like Grabble or Word Detector will help you get a little bit better of a grade in your next spelling test without even feeling like you were studying.
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15 Best Free Online Word Games
Michael Kwan • Sep 28, 2022 • 7 min read
Adapted from Getty Images
All you need to play free word games online is a web browser and an internet connection.
Challenge your vocabulary and put your puzzle-solving skills to the test. Dare to unscramble letters, find words, and solve mystery phrases. There’s something for everyone on this list of the best online word games you can play for free with no download required.
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Wordmeister
It isn’t always easy or convenient to find a human opponent for Scrabble. And even then, maybe you’d rather play against the computer instead. One of the best free word games online for this purpose is Wordmeister. This single-player Scrabble game follows all the fundamentals of the traditional game. So, it’s a great option for purists who want to brush up on their talents. And if you need any help forming a word, our WordFinder tool can help you the same as it does with Scrabble and Words With Friends.
If you’d rather play against other people, be sure to read through our list of Scrabble games to play with friends online.
wordmeister word game
Lexigo
If you play word games often, you’ll notice that many of them place letters in a grid.
Lexigo feels different right away because it arranges letters in a honeycomb pattern. It’s somewhat reminiscent of games like Boggle, but there are some key differences. For starters, the letters are in hexagons. You can also use the same letter more than once, and you must find the target word based on a hint. It’s challenging and rewarding.
Google Feud
It’s time to play the feud, search engine style! Fans of the Family Feud game show will instantly recognize the Google Feud format. The difference here is that you’re trying to guess what are the most popular autocomplete phrases in a Google search. For example, you might start with the phrase “I was bitten by a.” The top 10 results are on the board. In this case, the top response is “radioactive pig.” Bet you didn’t see that one coming!
Word Wipe
In Word Wipe, you need to join adjacent letter tiles together to create words. This includes not only horizontal and vertical connections but also diagonal ones, zig-zagging your way through the grid.
What makes playing Word Wipe different from other seemingly similar free online word games is that your main goal is to clear rows and columns. The letters are not replaced as you use them. How many lines can you clear before you run out of time?
Wordle
No collection of free online word games is complete without the game that has become a daily ritual for millions of people. Wordle is a simple but compelling game that challenges you to uncover a hidden word. To play, you type a five-letter word and wait to see if any of the letters change color. Yellow letters mean they are part of the answer, and green letters mean they are part of the answer and in the right spot. You use these clues to narrow down your word choices until you find the answer. The Quordle word game is even harder, getting you to guess four words at once.
The game’s difficulty comes from only providing six attempts to spell different words to find the answer. If you need any help finding the right words to play, be sure to consult our win streak-saving Wordle solver.
Skribbl.io
Looking for the best online word games with more of a visual flair? Embrace your inner Picasso with Skribbl.io. Here, you get to enjoy an online version of Pictionary with other players all around the world in real-time. You don’t need to create an account or log in with any credentials. Just enter your name, pick an animated avatar and join a game. You can even create a private room and invite your friends!
Read up on classic word games to rediscover more online games inspired by childhood favorites. Remember Boggle and Dungeons and Dragons?
Wander Words
Find the path to form the solution. In Wander Words, you click and drag to connect letters horizontally or vertically. It’s similar to Boggle, in this way, except you use all the letters in a single chain. The game provides a brief clue, like “compound words” or “vehicle.” The solution can be more than one word, like “music teacher.” How many puzzles can you solve in just five minutes?
wander words game
Words With Friends
One of the biggest reasons why Words With Friends is one of the best online word games is its huge community of active players.
The fresh take on the classic Scrabble game adds useful power-ups, a slightly modified game board, and a convenient Facebook connection to play with friends no matter where they are. It’s easy to play Words With Friends on a computer, because Zynga offers it as a convenient Facebook app. Our handy Words With Friends cheat is ready to help when you need it too.
Best Anagram Crossword
Crossword puzzles are perennial favorites, but what if you want something just a little different? Best Anagram Crossword is exactly that. You get the familiar crossword puzzle layout, except the clues for each word are actually anagrams of the solutions. It’s a clever combination of two common word game dynamics. And, when you’re feeling stuck, know that our handy anagram solver is always here to help.
best anagram crossword online game
Daily Word Search
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The Daily Word Search on MSN Games Zone is exactly what you need when you want to fill out a word search from the convenience of your web browser.
Each word search puzzle fits a theme, like “golf” or “camping.” As is par for the word search course, the words are hidden upward and downward, forward and backward. Simply click, hold and highlight. There’s a new word search every day.
Wordscapes
The game you love to play on your smartphone is just as easy to play online on your computer. The Wordscapes Facebook app works exactly the same way as its mobile counterpart. You get a circle of up to seven letters, connecting them together to form words to complete each puzzle. Participate in the weekly Wordscapes tournaments to earn coins and crowns. When you’re stumped, our comprehensive Wordscapes answers site has what you need to win too.
Wheel of Fortune Toss-Up Challenge
Love the game show on TV? Feel like you’re right there with Pat Sajak and Vanna White with the Wheel of Fortune Toss-Up Challenge. This totally free online word game is also totally official and playable on the Wheel of Fortune website directly.
It recreates the toss-up challenge from the TV show, revealing one letter at a time until you’re ready to solve. There are three rounds with three puzzles each, followed by a bonus round.
Scramble Words
Another excellent word game online for anagram fans is Scramble Words. If you’ve ever played a game like Word Cookies or Wordscapes Uncrossed, you’ll feel right at home here. Unscramble the letters to make new words and complete the puzzle. The main difference is that your letters are arranged in a simple row, like a Scrabble rack, instead of in a circle.
Codeword
What do you get when you cross a crossword puzzle with a dash of sudoku? Codeword is one of the best online word games you can play for free with no download. Words interconnect on a grid, and the numbers in each crossword space correspond to a specific letter. For example, every “2” in the puzzle might be the letter “E.” The puzzle uses all 26 letters at least once. This is a fun and engaging challenge for sure!
Mini Crossword
Part of the reason why you want to play these word games online is because they’re quick and convenient.
If you only have a few extra minutes to spare, the Mini Crossword on the LA Times website could be the ticket. Regular crossword puzzles could take hours to complete. By comparison, you’ll only find about 10 clues in the Mini Crossword. And each word is no more than five letters long.
mini crossword games la times
Play Word Games Online With Friends
Sometimes, you want to play your favorite free word games alone. Other times, though, you want to play with friends. Just because you’re physically apart doesn’t mean you can’t partake in a fun game together. There are tons of free online word games to play with other people. Who has the stronger vocabulary or puzzle-solving ability? Who will come out on top?
Michael Kwan is a professional writer and editor with over 14 years of experience. Fueled by caffeine and WiFi, he's no stranger to word games and dad jokes.
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Spoiler: there is a danger that children will enjoy it so much that you may no longer be able to get tired and bribe with your phone.
Modern children are so accustomed to playing exclusively with gadgets that sometimes simple word games are not even familiar to them. Tired of hearing on the bus, in the car, in line: “Maaam, give me the phone!”? Then it's time to remember about "Cities", "Nonsense" and other fun games for which you will not need anything but your time and imagination.
Games with the name
This is the easiest game available even for preschoolers who are not yet familiar with letters. Perfectly develops phonemic hearing, attention and introduces sounds in a playful way.
How to play? Everything is extremely simple. Together with the child, we determine what letter his name begins with. And now we propose to come up with the maximum number of words that begin with this letter. Sasha is both an airplane, and a samovar, and a tablecloth, and a runner, and a Snickers, and even a spaniel. And then you can remember that Sasha is, in fact, also Alexander. And that means there will be apricots, oranges, pineapples, an airport, etc.
For those who are older, you can complicate the game and name words only of a certain group. This will help to get acquainted with the concepts of generalization and classification and significantly expand the vocabulary.
On "A" we will first invent only fruits, then vegetables, and then musical instruments.
Search for difficult words
This game is more difficult. It requires concentration, but even preschoolers who are just learning to read will play it with great pleasure. After all, you don’t need to invent words, but look around! Here, by the way, the reaction is also useful.
First you have to explain what a compound word is. This is a word that consists of several words or a stable expression of two words that refers to one thing.
Ready to find a dairy and concrete mixer? A motorcade, a gas station and a phone booth? Then go ahead. Ideal for long car rides.
With older children, you can take a notebook and keep a record of all the words found.
And with those who are younger, pronounce all complex words in syllables.
Story from word
This is an extremely fun and entertaining game that will keep you entertained for a long time. We come up with any word, it is better to start with short letters of 3-4. Let it be SUMMER. And now you need to come up with a new word from each letter. And ideally, so that you get a real mini-story. Suppose Pilot Raccoon rumbled wildly or Fox Egoza Quietly departed.
The benefits of the game: the child learns to coordinate words according to the meaning and masters the logic of the story.
How many one-word stories can you come up with?
Nonsense for the letter ….
Can you think of a story where all words start with the same letter? And you try! It can be very funny.
“Frantic possum Oleg very carefully walked around the garden outskirts”
Or “Sleepy pig Sasha sat angrily with a chest of soot”
By the way, you can choose a letter by the name of the players, or you can learn the alphabet in parallel.
In this case, one calls the number, and the second counts the letter of the alphabet. In a couple of months, the alphanumeric letter will fly off from the teeth.
Guess what I guessed
This is the easiest game for preschoolers. Teaches to classify objects, to determine their properties and features. You think of a word and give one hint. Suppose you think of a brick road sign and say "It's round." If the child did not guess correctly, give the following hint: "It's red." And so on ad infinitum. Don't forget to switch roles.
Danetka
If in the “guessing game” everyone just guesses the objects, then in “Danetka” you need to connect analytical thinking. The game teaches how to correctly compose and ask questions, listen carefully to the answers and analyze the information received. It is especially great to play danetki if you discuss in advance the number of possible questions. For example, "I thought of some princess, you have 20 questions to find out which one.
"
Grandma's Chest
This game is somewhat reminiscent of the famous Snowball. The first one says "I went to the attic and found striped socks in my grandmother's chest." The second continues: "I went to the attic and found striped socks and a teapot in my grandmother's chest." And so in a circle. The first one to forget at least one of the items already named loses.
Grandfather's story
A storytelling game that gently teaches the alphabet. The meaning is the same as in the grandmother's chest, only the items will have to be named alphabetically.
Example: “I went to the attic and found a watermelon, a shoe, a spindle, a nut, a plank, a raccoon, a hedgehog, a chewing gum, a splinter, a needle”, etc.
Cities
The city game, beloved by everyone in childhood, does not lose its popularity. It trains phonemic hearing, expands vocabulary and helps to get acquainted with new concepts. Ideal for a large group of children.
Choose a theme (cities, fruits, musical instruments, pieces of furniture, toys, etc.
). We name the word, and the next player calls the word with the last letter of the previous one.
You can change the rules and agree to name as many words as possible according to the given rules for a while. Are you sure that you can name more animals in 60 seconds than your student?
“I know five…”
This fun game from our childhood can be played not only with a ball. Although it is certainly more interesting with him. The game then develops not only the vocabulary and pumps encyclopedic knowledge, but also hones coordination.
Just offer each player a new category. Masha knows 5 horned animals. Sonya knows 5 names of rivers. "Danya knows 5 composers."
The older the child, the more difficult the categories can be. With this game, you can learn historical dates and geographical names, world capitals and animals by continent.
If you run into problems during the game, you know what to do at home. Open an encyclopedia and remember what other dinosaurs are, and what other marsupials, besides koalas and kangaroos, live in Australia.
Play, expand your vocabulary, develop your imagination and just be together, because you are a team!
Word games • Arzamas
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Children's room ArzamasMaterialsMaterials
Arzamas for classes with schoolchildren! A selection of materials for teachers and parents
Everything you can do in an online lesson or just for fun
Cartoons are festival winners. Part 2
Tales, parables, experiments and absurdity
Guide to Yasnaya Polyana
Leo Tolstoy's favorite bench, greenhouse, stable and other places of the writer's estate museum that are worth seeing with children named Petya
Migrants: how to fight for their rights with the help of music
Hip-hop, carnival, talking drums and other non-obvious ways
Old records: fairy tales of the peoples of the world
We listen and analyze the Japanese, Italian, Scandinavian and Russian fairy tales
Video: The ISS commander asks the scientist about space
Lecture at an altitude of 400 kilometers
How to make a film
Film of horrors, comedy and melodrama at home
The most unusual animation techniques
VR, sunbeams, jelly and spice cartoons
Play the world's percussion instruments
Learn how the gong, marimba and drum work and build your own orchestra
How to put a performance
shadows, reading and other home performance options for children
Soviet puzzles
Solve children's puzzles of the 1920-70s
22 Cartoon for the smallest
What if you are not six
From "The Wild Dog Dingo" to "Timur and his team"
What you need to know about the main Soviet books for children and adolescents
A guide to children's poetry of the twentieth century
From Agnia Barto to Mikhail Yasnov: children's poems in Russian
10 books by artists
The pages of tracing paper are Milanese fog, and the binding is the border between reality and fantasy
How to choose a modern children's book
“Like Pippi, only about love”: explaining new books through old ones
Verbal games
"Hat", "telegrams", "MPS" and other old and new games
Games from classic books
What the heroes of the works of Nabokov, Lindgren and Milne play
Plasticine animation: Russian school
From "Plasticine Crow" to plasticine "Sausage"
Cartoons - winners of festivals
"Brave Mom", "My Strange Grandfather", "A Very Lonely Rooster" and others
Non-fiction for children
How the heart beats whale, what's inside the rocket and who plays the didgeridoo - 60 books about the world around
Guide to foreign popular music
200 artists, 20 genres and 1000 songs that will help you understand the music of the 1950s-2000s
Cartoons based on poems
Poems by Chukovsky, Kharms, Gippius and Yasnov in Russian animation
Home games
Shadow theater, crafts and paper dolls from children's books and magazines of the 19th-20th centuries
Books for the smallest
0 to 5: read, look at, study
Puppet animation: Russian school
Amorous Crow, Imp No.
13, Lyolya and Minka and other old and new cartoons
Smart coloring books
Museums and libraries offer to paint their collections
Reprints and reprints of children's books
Favorite fairy tales, novels and magazines of the last century, which can be bought again
What can be heard in classical music by voices
4 cuckoos and night forest sounds in great compositions of the 18th–20th centuries
Soviet educational cartoons
Archimedes, dinosaurs, Antarctica and space — popular science cartoons in the USSR
Logic problems
Solve the wise men's dispute, make a bird out of a shirt and count kittens correctly
Modern children's stories
The best short stories about grandmothers, cats, spies and knights
why you can't lie down on the edge. Bonus: 5 lullabies by the Naadya group
Musical fairy tales
How Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Prokofiev work with the plots of children's fairy tales
Armenian School of Animation
The most rebellious cartoons of the Soviet Union
Dina Goder’s collection of cartoons
The program director of the Big Cartoon Festival advises what to watch with a child
Cartoons about art
How to tell children about art
40 riddles about everything in the world
What burns without fire and who has a sieve in his nose: riddles from "Chizh", "Hedgehog" and books by Marshak and Chukovsky
Yard games
Traffic light, Shtander, Ring and other games for a large company
Poems that are interesting to learn by heart
What to choose if you were asked to learn a poem about mother, New Year or autumn
Old audio performances for children
"Ole Lukoye", "The Gray Sheika", "Cinderella" and other interesting Soviet recordings
Cartoons with classical music
How animation works with the music of Tchaikovsky, Verdi and Glass
How children's counting rhymes work
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"Hat", "telegrams", "MPS" and other games that require almost nothing but companies and desire to have a good time
Author Lev Gankin
Primer “A.
B. C. Trim, alphabet enchanté. Illustrations by Bertal. France, 1861 Wikimedia Commons Oral games
Associations
Game for a big company. The host briefly leaves the room, during which time the rest decide which of those present they will guess (this may be the host himself). Upon returning, the player asks the others questions - what flower do you associate this person with, what vehicle, what part of the body, what kitchen utensils, etc. - in order to understand who is hidden. Questions can be very different - this is not limited by anything other than the imagination of the players. Since associations are an individual matter and an exact match may not happen here, it is customary to give the guesser two or three attempts. If the company is small, you can expand the circle of mutual acquaintances who are not present at that moment in the room, although the classic version of "associations" is still a hermetic game.
Game of P
A game for a company of four people, an interesting variation on the "hat" theme (see below), but does not require any special accessories.
One player guesses a word to another, which he must explain to the others, but he can only use words starting with the letter "p" (any, except for the same root). That is, the word "house" will have to be explained, for example, as follows: "I built - I live." If you couldn’t guess right away, you can throw up additional associations: “building, premises, space, the simplest concept ...” And at the end add, for example, “Perignon” - by association with Dom Perignon champagne. If the guessers are close to winning, then the facilitator will need comments like “about”, “approximately”, “almost right” - or, in the opposite situation: “bad, wait!”. Usually, after the word is guessed, the explainer comes up with a new word and whispers it into the ear of the guesser - he becomes the next leader.
Lectures for children on this topic:
A course of lectures for children about the languages of the world
How many languages in the world, how do they differ and how are they similar to each other
A course of lectures for children about strange and new words of the Russian language
Why do linguists study jargon, parasitic words and speech errors
Primer "A.
B. C. Trim, alphabet enchanté. Illustrations by Bertal. France, 1861 Wikimedia Commons Say the Same Thing
An upbeat and fast-paced game for two, named after a video clip by the inventive rock band OK Go, from which many people learned about it (the musicians even developed a mobile application that helps to play it from a distance, although it is currently unavailable). The meaning of the game is that on the count of one-two-three each of the players pronounces a randomly chosen word. Further, the goal of the players is, with the help of successive associations, to come to a common denominator: for the next time, two or three, both pronounce a word that is somehow connected with the previous two, and so on until the desired coincidence occurs. Suppose the first player said the word "house" and the second player said the word "sausage"; in theory, they can coincide very soon, if on the second move after one-two-three both say "store". But if one says “shop”, and the other says “refrigerator” (why not a sausage house?), then the game can drag on, especially since it’s impossible to repeat - neither the store nor the refrigerator will fit, and you will have to think, say, before "refrigerator" or "IKEI".
If the original words are far from each other (for example, "curb" and "weightlessness"), then the gameplay becomes completely unpredictable.
Characters
A game for the company (the ideal number of players is from four to ten), which requires from the participants not only a good imagination, but also, preferably, a little bit of acting skills. As usual, one of the players briefly leaves the room, and while he is gone, the rest come up with a word, the number of letters in which matches the number of participants remaining in the room. Next, the letters are distributed among the players, and a character is invented for each of them (therefore, words that contain "b", "s" or "b" do not fit). Until the word is guessed, the players behave in accordance with the chosen character - the leader's task is to understand exactly what characters his partners portray and restore the hidden word. Imagine, for example, that a company consists of seven people. One leaves, the rest come up with a six-letter word "old man" and distribute roles among themselves: the first, say, will be with indoor, the second - t erpel, the third - a secondary, the fourth - p asylum, the fifth - and mane and sixth - to ovary.
The returning player is greeted by a cacophony of voices - the company "lives" their roles until they are unraveled, and the host asks the players questions that help reveal their image. The only condition is that as soon as the presenter pronounces the correct character - for example, guesses the insidious one - he must admit that his incognito has been revealed and announce the number of his letter (in the word "old man" - the sixth).
Recognize the song
A game for a company of four to five people. The host leaves, and the remaining players choose a well-known song and distribute its words among themselves - each word. For example, the song “Let there always be sun” is guessed: one player gets the word “let”, the second - “always”, the third - “will be”, the fourth - “sun”. The host returns and begins to ask questions - the most varied and unexpected: "What is your favorite city?", "Where does the Volga flow?", "What to do and who is to blame?".
The task of the respondents is to use their own word in the answer and try to do it in such a way that it does not stand out too much; you need to answer quickly and not very extensively, but not necessarily truthfully. Answers to questions in this case can be, for example, “It’s hard for me to choose one city, but let today it will be Rio de Janeiro" or "Volga - into the Caspian, but this does not happen always , every third year it flows into the Black". The presenter must catch which word is superfluous in the answer and guess the song. They often play with lines from poetry rather than from songs.
Pickup
A game for four people divided into pairs (in principle, there can be three or four pairs). The mechanics is extremely simple: the first player from the first pair whispers a word (a common noun in the singular) into the ear of the first player from the second pair, then they must take turns calling their associations with this word (in the same form - common nouns; cognate words cannot be used ).
After each association, the teammate of the player who voiced it calls out his word, trying to guess if it was originally guessed - and so on, until the problem is solved by someone; at the same time, all associations already sounded in the game can be used in the future, adding one new one at each move. For example, suppose there are players A and B on one team, and C and D on the other. Player A whispers the word "old man" into player C's ear. Player C says aloud to his partner D: "age". If D immediately answers "old man", then the pair of C and D scores a point, but if he says, for example, "youth", then the move goes to player A, who, using the word "age" suggested by C (but discarding the irrelevant to the case "youth" from D), says to his partner B: "age, man." Now B will probably guess the old man - and his team with A will already earn a point. But if he says "teenager" (thinking that it is about the age when boys turn into men), then C, to whom the move suddenly returned, will say " age, man, eightieth birthday”, and here, probably, “old man” will be guessed.
In one of the variants of the game, it is also allowed to "shout": this means that, having suddenly guessed what was meant, the player can shout out the option not on his turn. If he guessed right, his team will get a point, but if he rushed to conclusions, the team will lose a point. They usually play up to five points.
IPU
Game for a big company. Here we are forced to warn readers that, having seen this text in full, you will never be able to drive again - the game is one-time.
Spoiler →
First, the player who gets to drive leaves the room. When he returns, he must find out what MPS means - all that is known in advance is that the bearer of this mysterious abbreviation is present in the room right now. To find out the correct answer, the driver can ask other players questions, the answers to which should be formulated as “yes” or “no”: “Does he have blond hair?”, “Does he have blue eyes?”, “Is this a man?”, “He in jeans?", "Does he have a beard?"; moreover, each question is asked to a specific player, and not to all at once.
Most likely, it will quickly become clear that there is simply no person in the room who meets all the criteria; Accordingly, the question arises, according to what principle the players give answers. "Opening" this principle will help answer the main question - what is MPS. The Ministry of Railways is not the Ministry of Communications at all, but m oy p right s seated (that is, each player always describes the person sitting to his right). Another option is COP, to then about answered n last (that is, everyone talks about who answered the previous question).
Contact
A simple game that can be played with a group of three or more people. One thinks of a word (noun, common noun, singular) and calls its first letter aloud, the task of the others is to guess the word, remembering other words with this letter, asking questions about them and checking if the presenter guessed.
The facilitator's task is not to reveal the next letters in the word to the players for as long as possible. For example, a word with the letter "d" is guessed. One of the players asks the question: “Is this by chance not the place where we live?” This is where the fun begins: the host must figure out as quickly as possible what the player means and say “No, this is not“ house ”” (well, or, if it was a“ house ”, honestly admit it). But in parallel, other players also think the same thing, and if they understand what “house” means before the leader, then they say: “contact” or “there is contact”, and start counting up to ten in chorus (while the count is going on, the presenter still has a chance to escape and guess what it is about!), and then they call the word. If at least two matched, that is, at the expense of ten they said “house” in chorus, the presenter must reveal the next letter, and the new guesser version will already begin with the now known letters “d” + the next one. If it was not possible to beat the host on this question, then the guessers offer a new option.
Of course, it makes sense to complicate the definitions, and not ask everything directly - so the question about "home" would sound better like "Is this not where the sun rises?" (with a reference to the famous song "House of the Rising Sun" by The Animals). Usually, the one who eventually gets to the searched word (names it or asks a question leading to victory) becomes the next leader.
Writing games
Encyclopedia
Not the fastest, but extremely exciting game for a company of four people - you will need pens, paper and some kind of encyclopedic dictionary (preferably not limited thematically - that is, TSB is better than a conditional "biological encyclopedia"). The host finds a word in the encyclopedia that is unknown to anyone present (here it remains to rely on their honesty - but cheating in this game is uninteresting and unproductive).
The task of each of the players is to write an encyclopedic definition of this word, inventing its meaning from the head and, if possible, disguising the text as a real small encyclopedic article. The presenter, meanwhile, carefully rewrites the real definition from the encyclopedia. After that, the “articles” are shuffled and read out by the presenter in random order, including the real one, and the players vote for which option seems most convincing to them. In the end, the votes are counted and points are distributed. Any player receives a point for correctly guessing the real definition and one more point for each vote given by other participants to his own version. After that, the sheets are distributed back and a new word is played out - there should be about 6-10 of them in total. You can also play this game in teams: come up with imaginary definitions collectively. The game "poems" is arranged in a similar way - but instead of a compound word, the host selects two lines from some little-known poem in advance and invites the participants to add quatrains.
Game from Inglourious Basterds
A game for a company of any size that many knew before the Quentin Tarantino film, but it does not have a single name. Each player invents a role for his neighbor (usually it is some famous person), writes it on a piece of paper and sticks the piece of paper on his neighbor's forehead: accordingly, everyone sees what role someone has, but does not know who they are. The task of the participants is, with the help of leading questions, the answers to which are formulated as “yes” or “no” (“Am I a historical figure?”, “Am I a cultural figure?”, “Am I a famous athlete?”), to find out who exactly they are. In this form, however, the game exhausts itself rather quickly, so you can come up with completely different themes and instead of famous people play, for example, in professions (including exotic ones - "carousel", "taxidermist"), in film and literary heroes (you can mix them with real celebrities, but it’s better to agree on this in advance), food (one player will be risotto, and the other, say, green cabbage soup) and even just items.
Bulls and cows
A game for two: one participant thinks of a word, and it is agreed in advance how many letters should be in it (usually 4-5). The task of the second is to guess this word by naming other four- or five-letter words; if some letters of the named word are in the hidden one, they are called cows, and if they have the same place inside the word, then these are bulls. Let's imagine that the word "eccentric" is conceived. If the guesser says “dot”, then he receives an answer from the second player: “three cows” (that is, the letters “h”, “k” and “a”, which are in both “eccentric” and “dot”, but in different places). If he then says "head of head", he will no longer get three cows, but two cows and one bull - since the letter "a" in both "eccentric" and "head" is in the fourth position. As a result, sooner or later, it is possible to guess the word, and the players can change places: now the first one will guess the word and count the bulls and cows, and the second one will name his options and track the extent to which they coincide with the one guessed.
You can also complicate the process by simultaneously guessing your own word and guessing the opponent's word.
Intellect
Writing game for the company (but you can also play together), consisting of three rounds, each for five minutes. In the first, players randomly type thirteen letters (for example, blindly poking a book page with their finger) and then form words from them, and only long ones - from five letters. In the second round, you need to choose a syllable and remember as many words as possible that begin with it, you can use single-root ones (for example, if the syllable "house" is selected, then the words "house", "domra", "domain", "domain", "brownie", "housewife", etc.). Finally, in the third round, the syllable is taken again, but now you need to remember not ordinary words, but the names of famous people of the past and present in which it appears, and not necessarily at the beginning - that is, both Karamzin and McCartney will fit the syllable "kar" , and, for example, Hamilcar.
An important detail: since this round provokes the most disputes and scams, game participants can ask each other to prove that this person is really a celebrity, and here you need to remember at least the profession and country. Typical dialogue: "What, you don't know Hamilcar? But this is a Carthaginian commander!” After each round, points are counted: if a particular word is the same for all players, it is simply crossed out, in other cases, players are awarded as many points for it as the opponents could not remember it. In the first round, you can still add points for especially long words. Based on the results of the rounds, it is necessary to determine who took the first, second, third and other places, and add up these places at the end of the game. The goal is to get the smallest number at the output (for example, if you were the winners of all three rounds, then you will get the number 3 - 1 + 1 + 1, and you are the champion; less cannot be purely mathematical).
B. C. Trim, alphabet enchanté. Illustrations by Bertal. France, 1861 Wikimedia Commons Frame
A game for any number of people, which was invented by one of the creators of the Kaissa chess program and the author of the anagram search program Alexander Bitman. First, the players choose several consonants - this will be the frame, the skeleton of the word. Then the time is recorded (two or three minutes), and the players begin to “stretch” vowels (as well as “й”, “ь”, “ъ”) onto the frame to make existing words. Consonants can be used in any order, but only once, and vowels can be added in any number. For example, players choose the letters "t", "m", "n" - then the words "fog", "cloak", "mantle", "coin", "darkness", "ataman", "dumbness" and other. The winner is the one who can come up with more words (as usual, these should be common nouns in the singular). The game can be played even with one letter, for example, "l". The words “silt”, “lay”, “yula”, “aloe”, “spruce” are formed around it, and if we agree that the letter can be doubled, “alley” and “lily”.
If the standard "framework" is mastered, then the task may be to compose a whole phrase with one consonant: a textbook example from the book by Evgeny Gik - "Bobby, kill the boy and beat the woman at the baobab."
Chain of words
Game for any number of players. Many people know it under the name "How to make an elephant out of a fly", and it was invented by the writer and mathematician Lewis Carroll, the author of "Alice". The “chain” is based on metagram words, that is, words that differ by only one letter. The task of the players is to turn one word into another with the least number of intermediate links. For example, let's make a "goat" from a "fox": FOX - LINDE - PAW - KAPA - KARA - KORA - GOAT. It is interesting to give tasks with a plot: so that the “day” turns into “night”, the “river” becomes the “sea”. The well-known chain, where the "elephant" grows out of the "fly", is obtained in 16 moves: FLY - MURA - TURA - TARA - KARA - KARE - CAFE - KAFR - MURDER - KAYUK - HOOK - URIK - LESSON - TERM - DRAIN - STON - ELEPHANT (example of Evgeny Gik).
For training, you can compete in the search for metagrams for any word. For example, the word "tone" gives "sleep", "background", "current", "tom", "tan" and so on - whoever scores more options wins.
Hat
A game for a company of four people, requiring simple equipment: pens, paper and a “hat” (an ordinary plastic bag will do). Sheets of paper need to be torn into small pieces and distributed to the players, the number of pieces depends on how many people are playing: the larger the company, the less for each. Players write words on pieces of paper (one for each piece of paper) and throw them into the "hat". There are also options here - you can play just with words (noun, common noun, singular), or you can play with famous people or literary characters. Then the participants are divided into teams - two or more people each; the task of each - in 20 seconds (or 30, or a minute - the timing can be set at your own choice) to explain to your teammates the largest number of words arbitrarily pulled out of the "hat", without using the same root.
If the driver could not explain a word, it returns to the hat and will be played by the other team. At the end of the game, the words guessed by different representatives of the same team are summed up, their number is counted, and the team that has more pieces of paper is awarded the victory. A popular version of the game: everything is the same, but in the first round the players explain the words (or describe the characters) orally, in the second round they show in pantomime, in the third round they explain the same words in one word. And recently a board game has appeared, where you need not only to explain and show, but also to draw.
Telegrams
Game for any number of players. The players choose a word, for each letter of which they will need to come up with a part of the telegram - the first letter will be the beginning of the first word, the second - the second, and so on. For example, the word "fork" is selected. Then the following message can become a telegram: “The camel is healed.
I'm flying a crocodile. Aibolit". Another round of the game is the addition of genres. Each player gets the task to write not one, but several telegrams from the same word - business, congratulatory, romantic (the types of messages are agreed in advance). Telegrams are read aloud, the next word is chosen.
even more different games for one or a company
Home games
Shadow theater, crafts and paper dolls from children's books and magazines of the XIX-XX centuries Ring and other games
Games from classic books
What do the heroes of the works of Nabokov, Lindgren and Milne play
A children's course on where games, jokes, horror stories and memes come from and why we need them
Children's room
Special project
Children's room Arzamas
Sources
- Balandin B.
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