How to play Bowl of Nouns

Everybody fills the bowl first

Four nouns each, written at the same time, dropped into one bowl. Two teams are taken from the seating rather than picked, so nobody is chosen last.

Your name is on every noun you wrote, and the table sees it the moment the slip comes out. That is the whole of the moderation policy here and it is a deliberate one: a shared text box is a problem because it is anonymous, and this one is not.

Three rounds, one bowl, and it never changes

On your team's turn you pull a slip and get your side to say the word before the clock stops. Every one they get, you pull another. When the bowl is empty every noun goes straight back in and you play it again — harder.

Round one you may say anything. Round two you get one word and one word only. Round three you may not speak at all. By then everybody has heard the whole bowl twice and still cannot place the thing you are waving your arms about, which is the joke the game is built on.

Nothing is typed and nothing is adjudicated

The guessing happens out loud on the call. The software holds the bowl, runs the clock, keeps the turn order and writes down what the room says happened — it never decides whether a guess was right, because four people shouting already decided that.

It takes no bots, and that is a decision rather than a gap: a bot cannot write a noun that belongs to your table, cannot mime one, and cannot hear somebody shout. Bring four people at the very least.

Questions people ask

Where do the words come from?

From the people playing. There is no deck — everyone writes four nouns at the start, and those twenty-four or thirty-two slips are the entire game. It is why no two sittings are alike and why it is funnier at work than any deck we could write.

Is a shared text box safe to put in front of a team?

It is here, because it is not anonymous. Every noun carries the name of whoever wrote it from the moment it leaves the bowl. There is no word filter — that would be a promise we could not keep in two languages, and it would do nothing about the noun that is unpleasant because it is about somebody in the room.

Does anybody have to install anything to play Bowl of Nouns?

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 Bowl of Nouns?

4 to 12 — best with six or eight. A room seats up to 12.

How long does a game of Bowl of Nouns take?

About 20 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.