A round
Add a letter, rearrange, hand it on
The baton is a word. Running a leg means taking every letter of it, adding one more, and rearranging the lot into a real word: ATE, RATE, ALTER, RELATE, RELATES. It starts at three letters and is home at nine, which is six legs.
Rearrange as freely as you like — RATE and TEAR are the same move from ATE, because a relay is about letters rather than spelling. What you may never do is put a letter down. A word that quietly drops one is refused, and the refusal says which mistake it was, which is how a table learns the rule in one climb rather than three.
The baton passes round the table one leg at a time. Whoever is holding it types; everybody else shouts. That is the game rather than a limitation to work around: a table where the quickest typist runs every leg is a table where five people are watching one person play.
The baton never drops
If nobody finds a word before the clock stops, the machine runs the leg and the climb goes on. That rung earns the table nothing and the review shows exactly which ones they were, so a blank minute costs a point rather than the afternoon.
It works that way because the alternative was tried and is worse. A climb that ends at the first failure punishes six people for one person's bad thirty seconds, and it means the sixth leg — which is the hard one and the good one — gets played by almost nobody.
The one thing that ends a climb
A rung that nothing can be added to. Some words simply cannot take another letter and be rearranged into anything, and a runner who plays one has ended the relay — not by failing, but by choosing badly with a perfectly good word.
Nothing warns you, because a warning is the game playing itself. It is the decision that turns the fifth and sixth legs from a lookup into a choice: the obvious word and the word that leaves the next person somewhere to go are often not the same word.
Afterwards the table is shown one route from the seed to nine letters that existed all along. One, not the one — there are thousands from any three-letter start, and a table that found a better climb should not be told it was wrong.
On the sheet
Questions people ask
Can I shout the word at whoever is typing?
That is the game. It is co-operative and there is nothing hidden, so the person on the baton and the five people watching are looking at exactly the same letters. Unlike a race it does not matter who says it first, which is why it survives a video call where a race does not.
Does the order of the letters matter?
Not at all. You are carrying a handful of letters, not a spelling. Any arrangement that makes a real word counts, as long as every letter you were given is still in there and exactly one new one has joined them.
What happens if I get stuck?
The clock runs out and the machine passes the baton on for you. You lose the point for that rung and the climb carries on — the review says which legs were yours and which were handed over, so it is honest without being final.
Can I play it on my own?
Yes, and one of the two ways is the daily: one climb, the same three letters as everybody else, once a day. The other is to sit down with the runners — the Ringer finds a word for seven legs in eight and gets home less often than anybody, because every extra word it knows is another chance to leave you a baton nobody can carry.
Does anybody have to install anything to play Anagram Relay?
No. It runs in the browser everyone already has open. One person opens a room, reads out the six-character code or pastes the link into the channel, and everyone else is at the table in a couple of seconds.
Do we need accounts?
No. There is no sign-up, no password and no email address anywhere in the flow. You pick a name when you sit down, and that is the whole of it.
How many people can play Anagram Relay?
1 to 8 — best with four. A room seats up to 12.
How long does a game of Anagram Relay take?
About 12 minutes, which is the length of a coffee break rather than the length of a games night. Nobody is the host in the sense of holding the controls, so a round finishes whether or not everyone is still looking at it.
Does it work over a video call?
That is what it is for. The game is on the screen and the talking is on the call — nobody has to describe a board to anybody, and the parts that must stay private stay on the server rather than being read out.