Put the phone against your forehead with the screen facing out and you become the only person in the room who does not know the word. Your friends describe it, you guess, and a round runs for thirty, sixty or ninety seconds. The controls are the two halves of the board — top half for a correct guess, bottom half to pass — because with the phone on your forehead you cannot watch your finger, and normal-sized buttons are impossible to find. Press start, three seconds count down, and the first word appears; when time is up you get the list of what you guessed and what you skipped. The deck holds one hundred and twenty words across food, animals, places, jobs, objects and actions, written separately for English, Korean, Japanese and Spanish.
Passing costs nothing. A penalty would reward clinging to a word you do not know, which is the dullest possible play — one word eating twenty seconds leaves everyone else with nothing to do.
If the deck runs out it is reshuffled and refilled. A ninety-second round genuinely gets through a full pass of a single category.
No tilt sensors. Permission prompts for motion sensors differ by browser and iOS asks every time, which turns a passed-around phone into «mine doesn't work». Tapping half the screen behaves identically everywhere.
Nothing is stored. The result lists live on screen and a reload clears them.
With the screen facing outward, you are the only person in the room who does not know the word. Your friends describe it and you guess — which means most of the entertainment happens on the describing side. The more rushed a description gets, the stranger it becomes, and the strange ones outlive the answers.
Guess and the next word appears; give up and pass. When the clock ends, your score is the number guessed, and passing the phone around a group produces a ranking straight away.
Rounds come in thirty, sixty and ninety seconds. Sixty is the default because of what happens at either end: thirty ends before anyone has settled into the category, and ninety outlasts the arm holding the phone up.
This game has a constraint others do not: you cannot look at the screen while you press it. The phone is on your forehead, so your finger is working blind, and ordinary buttons simply cannot be found.
So the whole board is split into two zones. «Somewhere in the top half» is a target you can hit without looking. Each zone is labelled in large type — not for you, but for the friends staring at the screen, who end up shouting «top! top!» at you.
A tilt-sensor version exists in other implementations and was left out on purpose. Permission handling differs between browsers and iOS re-asks every session, which means in a group passing one phone around somebody is always locked out. Tapping behaves the same everywhere.
The score counts guesses only. Skipped words are listed but never subtracted. A penalty would make it correct to hang on to a word you do not know, and that is the dullest thing that can happen at a table — twenty seconds on one word leaves everyone watching with nothing to do.
When passing is free, people pass often, so a round churns through many words and one or two of them inevitably produce a description that makes no sense at all. The rule exists to manufacture those moments.
If your group does want a penalty, the results screen lists skipped words with a count, so you can subtract them yourselves. The game simply does not impose it.
First, no words contained in the answer. Saying «fried» while describing fried chicken is dictation, not description.
Second, no dictionary synonyms. Calling a cinema «the movie theatre» ends the round in one line. «Where you go in holding popcorn» leaves room for three other people to add angles.
Those two rules push descriptions toward lived situations, which is why the deck only contains words that can be approached from several directions — shape, use, place or memory, at least two of the four.
Five of the six categories are nouns: food, animals, places, jobs and objects. The sixth is actions. With nouns only, descriptions converge on appearance and purpose, and rounds start to feel alike.
Actions push the describers into using their bodies. «Hanging laundry» or «missing the bus» is faster to mime than to explain, and the mime is what makes the room laugh. Action words were chosen on exactly that criterion: they have to be actable.
Leaving the category on «Any» mixes all six. Pick a single category if you want a particular flavour — with children, animals or food on its own works better than the mix.
The usual format is one round each at the same length and category, ranked by number guessed. The deck is reshuffled every round, so turn order carries almost no advantage.
Tie-breaks resolve fast with a single thirty-second round. Nothing is saved, so photograph the results screen if you want to keep the standings.
Team play works too: two teams alternate rounds and add up their totals. Fixing one describer per team makes describing skill part of the team's strength and tightens the whole game.
Hold the phone against your forehead with the screen pointing at everyone else. You are the only one who cannot see the word; they describe it and you guess. Tap the top half of the screen when you get it, the bottom half to skip. Your score is how many you guessed before time ran out.
Because with the phone on your forehead you cannot watch where your finger lands, and a normal button is impossible to find blind. Half the board is large enough to hit without looking. On a keyboard the same actions are the up and down arrows.
Two are usual. First, no words contained in the answer. Second, no dictionary synonyms. Blocking just those two pushes the descriptions toward situations and memories, which is where the game gets funny.
One describer is enough, but three to six works best. Several people describing from different angles is what produces the «oh, that!» moment, while a very large group ends up talking over itself.
Deliberately not supported. Motion-sensor permission works differently across browsers and has to be granted every time on iOS, so in a group passing one phone around somebody always ends up unable to play. Tapping works the same on every device.