A hidden word, an alphabet, and a budget of six mistakes. Hangman is a guessing game only for the first two letters; after that it is a deduction game, because every blank you fill in and every letter you rule out narrows what the word can possibly be. Good players are not luckier than bad ones. They are reading the gaps.

It has the best pacing of any pen-and-paper game. The first few guesses feel free, the fourth wrong one turns the whole thing tense, and the last one is genuinely uncomfortable — all from a mechanic you can explain in a sentence.

Where it comes from

Nobody knows who invented it, which is normal for parlour games. It appears in Victorian collections of children's amusements in the 1890s, sometimes under different names, and it clearly circulated by word of mouth long before anybody bothered to write it down. The macabre drawing came with it, and has been quietly softened in a great many classrooms since.

What is more interesting is how little the game has changed. Word games usually accrete rules; this one has kept the same three ingredients — a hidden word, a fixed number of misses, and one player who knows the answer — for well over a century, which is a decent sign that the design was right the first time.

What this version does with it

Three ways to play, and they are genuinely different experiences. Against the computer it picks a word and you get a category as your only help, which is the classic. The Daily gives everyone the same word on the same date, computed from the calendar rather than fetched from anywhere, so it is the same puzzle for you as for anyone else that day and there is exactly one of them. And 2 Player hands the setting job back to a human: one of you types a word — masked on screen so the other cannot read it — adds an optional hint, and passes the phone across.

That last mode is the one we would point you at. A computer picks a fair word; a person picks a mean one, and being beaten by a friend's word choice is a completely different kind of loss. Records are kept separately for all three, so a brutal 2 Player streak cannot flatter your solo numbers.

Thirty seconds to start

• Tap letters, or just type them — the whole keyboard works, and Enter moves to the next word.
• The category is shown from the start. There is an optional hint if you want more.
• Six wrong letters ends the round. Right ones are free.

How to stop losing on the sixth letter

Spend a couple of vowels, then stop and look at the shape you have. A word with an established pattern of blanks is telling you far more than the remaining alphabet is, and consonant clusters are cheap information — a well-chosen pair of letters can eliminate half the candidates at once. And before you burn your last guess, actually count what could still fit. The guide has the full approach, including which letters are worth spending early.

Read the full Hangman guide  →

↑ Back to the game