Miss a Beat
120 categories, a beat that can speed up, and nowhere to hide when it comes round to you.
Who's in the circle?
Names are what the knockout runs on. The phone has to know who is still in.
- 1
- 2
Bigger group to type in? The team generator fills these in for you.
How fast?
One word per beat, all the way round the circle.
Does it speed up?
Category packs
Pick at least one pack to start
Miss the beat, repeat someone, or dry up, and you're out.
How to play
- 1Type everyone into the circle, pick a speed, and choose your category packs. Nothing is preselected, so pick the ones that suit the room.
- 2A category comes up. Read it out, agree who is going first, and take the four counts in.
- 3Go round in order. One answer each, on the beat, nothing anyone has already said.
- 4The moment somebody fumbles, tap the big button. The beat stops so the room can argue about it properly, then tap whoever went out.
- 5A fresh category is dealt and the survivors go again, until one player is left. Everyone scores a point for each player knocked out before them.
The trick to playing it well
Almost everybody goes out the same way, and it is not the way they expect. They are not stuck for an answer. They had one. The problem is that the person two seats before them said it. Then there is a beat and a half to find another one, and that is not enough time to think of anything at all. So hold two answers, never one. The good players in any circle are running a spare the whole way round, and topping it up while other people are talking.
The corollary is the counter-intuitive bit: spend your obvious answers first. Everyone's instinct on lap one is to save the good one and play something safe, which is exactly backwards. Bread, cheese and ham are gone by lap two whatever you do; the only question is whether you were the one who got to use them. Hoarding a clever answer through three laps and then losing it to somebody else is how most rounds are actually decided.
Rotate who starts, every single leg. This is the house rule worth adopting and the one nobody thinks of. Going first is a genuine advantage because the category is completely open and there is nothing yet to avoid repeating, and going last on the first lap is the worst seat at the table. If the same person always starts, the same person tends to win, and it looks like they are better at the game rather than earlier in the queue.
If your rounds are ending in twenty seconds, do not slow the beat down. That is almost always the wrong dial. A circle of ten on “Kinds of bread” is not too fast, it is too many people for the category. Ten players is thirty answers by the third lap, and there are not thirty kinds of bread anybody can name under pressure. Either pick from the deeper packs, or split eleven people into two circles of five or six and run them side by side. The game is much better at six than at eleven.
Settle the rulings before the first beat, not during. Three arguments happen in every group and all three are avoidable: whether a plural counts as a new answer (it should not, since “dog” and “dogs” is not two answers), whether brand names are allowed (say yes, it opens up half the food categories), and whether two words are allowed (say yes, or “things on a desk” dies immediately). Ten seconds up front, and nobody has to have that conversation while their own place in the game hangs on the outcome.
One last thing, and it is a social problem rather than a game one. There is always a moment where someone has clearly gone out and nobody in the room wants to be the person who says so. The fix is to agree at the start that you call yourself out. The player who fumbled says “that's me”, and anyone else only needs to say it if the player misses it twice. It sounds like a formality. It is the difference between a knockout that stays friendly and one where the same confident person adjudicates everybody else out.
Is this the clapping game from school?
Yes. It is the playground game most people know as Categories, or as Concentration, or by the rhythm rather than by any name at all: the slap-slap-clap-clap one, with someone calling out “categories… names of… cars” over the top. If that is the game you came here looking for, this is it, and you do not need to teach anyone the rules.
What is different is the one thing we replaced, and it changes the game more than it looks like it should. When a group claps its own beat, the group slows down. Nobody decides to; it just happens, and it happens at precisely the moment the game was about to get interesting: three laps in, when the category is running thin and everyone is struggling. The clap stretches, the hard turn gets an extra half-second, and the round quietly stops being a test of anything. A metronome will not do you that favour, which is why the difficult part of the round stays difficult.
The honest cost of that: the phone version is harder, and noticeably so the first time. If your group played the clapping version happily and finds this brutal, they are not worse at it. They were being let off, and now they are not. That is why it opens at 50 bpm with the speed-up off: roughly the tempo a forgiving group claps at anyway. Turn the ramp on once everyone has had a round.
It is worth being clear about what this is not, since two other games live nearby. It is not Scattergories, where everybody writes answers privately against a letter and scores for being unique. This is out loud, in turn, and there is nothing to write on. And it is not a general knowledge quiz: every category here has an answer a six-year-old could give, and the difficulty comes entirely from the clock and from the answers already spent.
Why going out early still scores
A straight knockout has one bad flaw, and every party game built on elimination has it: the first person out has to sit and watch the other seven play for the next ten minutes. They pick up their phone, and by the time the round ends you have lost them for the evening.
So the scoreboard is a survival ladder rather than a win-or-nothing. You score a point for every player knocked out before you. Going out third of eight banks two points, going out seventh banks six, and the survivor takes seven. Every elimination after yours is a point you have already earned, which is a small thing that does a large amount of work: it gives the people on the sofa a reason to care who goes next, and it means a player who has a bad first round is one good round away from being level again.
It also means the game does not need a fixed number of rounds. Play three, play nine, stop when somebody has to leave. The table still reads honestly, because everyone has been scoring the whole way through rather than waiting for a single winner-takes-all finish.
What's in the category packs
Every category is written to survive at least three laps of a decent-sized circle. A handful run shallower on purpose, and those are held back automatically once there are more than six of you. A category that empties before the second lap ends the round on arithmetic instead of on somebody fumbling.
🏠 Everyday things
20 categories. The warm-up pack, nothing to know
🍕 Food & drink
20 categories. The pack every room can play
🦊 Animals & nature
20 categories. Deep categories, good for big circles
🌍 Around the world
20 categories. Geography, the hardest pack here
💼 Work-safe
20 categories. Run this one on colleagues
🎒 Classroom
20 categories. Clean, and answerable by a six-year-old
Common questions
- How do you play Miss a Beat?
- Everyone sits in a circle. The phone shows a category and plays a steady beat. Going round in order, each player names something in that category on the beat: one word each, no repeats. Miss your beat, repeat something already said, or dry up completely, and you're out. The last player left standing wins the round.
- How many people do you need?
- Two will run it, and five or six is where it comes alive. A pair is a rally rather than a circle, because you always know your turn is next and the beat has nothing to catch you out with. But if a head-to-head is what you want, it deals the categories and keeps the score just the same. Twelve is the ceiling, because past that a single lap takes long enough that even the deepest category starts running dry before anyone is knocked out.
- Do we have to have the sound on?
- No. There is a silent mode, and the four dots on the card keep exactly the same beat the metronome would have. It is the right setting in a quiet house or a classroom, and it works best if one person claps or taps along with the dots so nobody has to watch the screen.
- What actually counts as an answer?
- That is for the room, and it is worth settling in the ten seconds before you start rather than in the middle of a round when somebody's place depends on it. The three that always come up: whether plurals count as a new answer (they should not), whether brand names count (usually yes), and whether two-word answers are allowed (yes, or half the categories collapse).
- Is this the same as the clapping game we played at school?
- Yes. It is the playground game usually called Categories or Concentration, with a metronome instead of the group clapping. That one change matters more than it sounds like it should, and it is covered in full further down this page.
- Does it work over Zoom or a video call?
- The knockout does; the shared beat does not, and that is a hard limitation rather than a setting. Audio arrives at every participant at a slightly different moment, so a metronome played down a call is not one beat, it is eight beats that disagree. Play it over a call with the sound off and one person counting out loud, and let their voice be the clock everyone is late by equally.
- Can children play it?
- The Classroom pack is written for exactly that: clean, and answerable by a six-year-old without any general knowledge. It opens at 50 bpm with the speed-up already off, which is the setting you want for a young room, so there is nothing to change first. The knockout also handles a mixed-age room better than most games, because a five-year-old going out third still scores.
- Should we turn the speed-up on?
- Once you have played a round, yes. It is off to begin with because a first circle should meet the game at one steady speed, but at a fixed tempo a good group on a deep category will simply keep going, and a round that cannot end gets abandoned rather than won. Ramping the speed guarantees a finish and moves the question from who knows the most vegetables to who cracks first, which is the better game. It resets to your starting tempo with every new category, so it never carries over into the next round.