Charades
900 words, a clock, and a score that rewards the hard ones. No cards to write out.
Seconds on the clock
Rounds
One round is a turn each — 2 turns.
Word packs
Pick at least one pack to start
Easy words score 1, tricky ones 2, hard ones 3. Three skips a turn.
How to play
- 1Pick your teams, how long each turn lasts, and which word packs you want. Nothing is preselected — choose the packs that suit the room.
- 2Hand the phone to whoever is acting first. Everyone else looks away until they tap to start.
- 3The word appears with what it is worth. Act it out — no talking, no pointing at real objects in the room.
- 4Tap Got it the moment your team says it, and the next word comes up straight away. Stuck? You get three skips a turn.
- 5When the clock hits zero the turn ends, the score is added up, and the phone passes to the next team.
The trick to playing it well
Almost everybody acts the whole word at once, and almost nobody should. The fastest way to be understood is to establish the categoryfirst — hold up a shape to show you are doing an object, or walk on the spot to show it is an animal — and only then start on the detail. A team that knows it is looking for an animal will get to “penguin” in four seconds. A team watching an unexplained waddle will not.
The second mistake is going too fast. When a guess is close, most actors panic and switch to a completely different mime, which throws away the progress their team had made. Slow down and exaggerate the part they nearly had instead. Repeat it bigger. Guessers home in on repetition far more reliably than on variety.
On skips: use them early or not at all. A skip in the first ten seconds costs you almost nothing, while a skip with fifteen seconds left costs you the word you would have got. If you can see immediately that you have no idea how to physically do the thing on screen, skip it in the first two seconds and move on.
One house rule worth adopting: let the guessing team see the difficulty badge, not just the actor. Knowing a word is worth three points tells them it is abstract, and they stop shouting object names — which speeds up the exact rounds that would otherwise run the clock down to nothing.
And if one team has the natural performer, give the other team the longer clock rather than a head start on points. A head start makes the game feel decided from the front; extra seconds just gives them more shots at it, and the scores still tell an honest story at the end.
Why the scoring works this way
Traditional charades scores one point a word, and that is why it so often ends early: whichever team has the more confident actor pulls ahead in the first round, the other team stops trying, and the last ten minutes are a formality. Scoring by difficulty fixes it. A team two turns down can take three hard words and be level again, so there is a reason to keep playing right to the end.
Skips are limited rather than punished for a related reason. Deducting points for a skip pushes a struggling team further under and produces exactly the “we have already lost” shrug the difficulty tiers exist to prevent. Three skips a turn caps the shopping-around problem — without a limit, a team would simply cycle the deck looking for three-pointers — while the real cost of a skip stays what it should be: the seconds it burns.
What's in the word packs
🙆 Everyday actions
100 words — things you do without thinking
🦒 Animals
100 words — the category that never fails
👷 Jobs
100 words — act the work, not the uniform
🏠 Around the house
100 words — objects everyone owns
🏓 Sports & hobbies
100 words — big movements, easy wins
😤 Feelings
100 words — all face, no props — the hard one
🦸 Kids
100 words — clean and silly, built for a class
🖨️ Office
100 words — work-safe, and painfully familiar
🎬 Movies
100 words — titles to act out, the classic round
Common questions
- How do you play charades?
- Split into teams. One person from a team acts out the word on the screen without speaking or pointing at objects, while their team shouts guesses. Every word they get scores; when the timer runs out the phone passes to the next team.
- How does the scoring work?
- Each word is worth its difficulty: an easy word scores 1, a tricky one 2, a hard one 3. That means a team behind can win it back on two or three hard words, which is what stops the game being over after the first round.
- How many people do you need for charades?
- Four is the practical minimum — two teams of two — and it works well up to about twenty. Above that, make more teams rather than bigger ones, or most of the room spends the game watching other people guess.
- How long should the timer be?
- Sixty seconds is the standard and the right default. Drop to forty-five with a confident group who are clearing eight or nine words a turn, and go to ninety with younger children or a group playing for the first time.
- What are the rules about talking?
- The actor cannot speak, mouth the word, or point at a real object in the room that is the answer. Everything else is allowed — gestures for the number of words, syllables, and the classic ear tug for 'sounds like'.
- Do we need paper, cards or a printer?
- No. The word generator does the job cards normally do: it draws from nine hundred words, never repeats one within a game, and keeps score so nobody has to remember the totals.
- What are good movie charades ideas?
- Turn on the Movies pack and it deals them out for you, a hundred titles tiered by how hard they are to act. The easy ones are single strong images like Jaws or Titanic; the hard ones are titles you have to build a sentence out of, which is where the points are.
- Is this suitable for children or a classroom?
- Yes — turn on the Kids pack and leave the others off. It is written clean and silly, and the timer plus team scoring makes it a good end-of-lesson activity. There is also an Office pack for work parties, which stays entirely work-safe.