Hangman

Hangman is a guessing game for two, played for centuries with a pencil and the back of an envelope. One player thinks of a word and draws a dash for each of its letters. The other calls letters out. Every letter that is in the word gets written into every dash it belongs to; every letter that is not adds one more line to a drawing of a figure on a gallows. The word is either spelled out before the drawing is finished, or it is not.

Here it is played as a match. A single round is the classic game above, but the two roles swap every round — so each player takes a turn both setting a word and guessing one — and the match runs until someone has guessed enough words.

Be the first player to guess three words correctly. You only score as the Guesser, and only by uncovering the whole word before the figure is finished. Setting a word your opponent fails to guess earns you nothing but the next round.

The two seats take turns at the two jobs:

Who sets first alternates between matches: Player 1 sets round 1 of the first match, Player 2 sets round 1 of the next, and so on. The roles keep alternating for as long as the match runs. A scoreboard at the top of the board shows each player's name above their own score, with the round number and the target below it, so both players can see how close the match is to being decided — and whose name is whose without the score running into it.

The round's Setter spells the word by tapping letters on the alphabet at the bottom of the board. Each tap adds a letter to the end; Erase rubs the last one out, and Deal one takes a word from the dictionary for a Setter who cannot think of one. The word appears above the keyboard, and only the Setter's screen shows it — the Guesser sees "Look away" until it is locked.

Two limits apply:

The longest word depends on that second setting: ten letters while listed words are required, because that is the longest the word list carries, and twelve with the check off, because that is how many slots the board has. The alphabet simply stops accepting letters at the limit.

The empty slots appear as the word is spelled, so the Guesser watches the row grow and shrink — the word's length is public information anyway. Lock stays on the board throughout, and is dim until the word is legal; the line under the heading says which rule is holding it back. Locking passes the turn to the Guesser.

The round's Guesser calls one letter at a time by tapping it.

A letter can only be called once: a key already called is no longer pressable.

Six wrong letters complete it, in this order:

Before the next round starts, the round's result is shown to both players:

The next round does not begin until both players press "Ready for next round" — so neither is rushed past the result, and a shared device can be handed over. Only then is the board swept clean and the roles swapped.

A round can end without a point being scored, but it can never end in a tie: the last letter uncovered and the sixth wrong letter cannot both happen on the same guess, because one guess is either right or wrong.

The first player to three correct guesses wins. Because only guessing scores, a player who sets a word that is never guessed simply hands the turn on with the score unchanged. The match is decided the instant either player reaches three.

In ordinary play someone always gets there. The match does carry a safety ceiling on the number of rounds, so a match in which no word is ever guessed cannot run forever: at the ceiling the higher score takes it, and level scores are a draw. That ceiling is far out of reach of real play — it exists only so an automated opponent that never uncovers a word still finishes.

The Guesser's opening letters are a frequency question: E, T, A, O, I, N, S carry most of English, and the vowels alone usually shape the word enough to guess the rest. Calling a rare letter early costs a limb for very little.

The Setter's best words are not the longest ones. A long word gives up many slots to a single common letter; a short word made of awkward letters — JAZZY, FUZZY, QUICK — gives up almost nothing and leaves the Guesser spending wrong letters to find out. Because the roles swap, a word you find hard to guess is one your opponent will have to set for you too.