Charades in teams, against the clock: one player gets their team to guess as many words as possible before time runs out, without speaking. 345 words built in, no slips of paper to cut, and there's always someone flapping their arms for “plane” while the team screams “BIRD”.
- Players
- 4 to 20
- Length
- about 20 min
- What you need
- Nothing, it all happens on screen
How to play Charades
- Create at least two teams and give them a name.
- Pick the number of rounds per team, from 1 to 10, and the length of a turn, from 30 seconds to 3 minutes.
- On its turn a team picks a mime: only they see the word, the others guess.
- “Got it” when the word is found, “Pass” to draw another — both move straight on to the next word.
- When the timer runs out, a summary lists the words guessed and passed, then the team ranking updates.
Variants
- Many tables dock a point for every word passed. Here passed words are just listed separately — a permanent record of who really phoned it in.
- To make it harder, ban sound effects as well as speech. The app doesn't enforce it, it only keeps time on your collective humiliation.
Frequently asked questions
- How many players do you need?
- Two teams minimum, so four people in practice. There's no maximum: the bigger the teams, the more witnesses to your mime skills.
- How many words are in the game?
- 345 words: objects, jobs, animals, actions, hobbies and well-known characters. They're drawn at random, with no repeats within a game.
- Can we play it remotely?
- No. Charades is played on one phone in the middle of the table: it's a game where everyone needs to watch the disaster live.