A round
A word, and the five you were about to say
Two teams, taken from the seating. On your team's turn one of you gets a card with a word on it and five words you may not say — which are, deliberately, the five that were already on their way out of your mouth.
You talk; your team shouts; every word they get draws the next card. You can give one up, and it costs you.
The other team is the referee
Your own team cannot see the card, and that is the point of the game. The other team can — all of it, for the whole turn — because the moment you say one of the five, somebody presses a buzzer, you lose the point and the card is burned.
It is the only game here where the secret is hidden from your own side and shown to theirs.
Nothing is typed and nothing is adjudicated
The guessing happens out loud. The software writes down what the room says happened, with a name against every press and the whole turn read back at the end.
Typed guesses were tried on paper and rejected: nobody types nine guesses in sixty seconds, and a game whose entire pleasure is four people shouting over each other should not be four people looking down.
On the sheet
Questions people ask
Are there bots for a short table?
No, and that is a decision rather than a gap. A bot cannot describe a word out loud on a video call and cannot hear a guess, so the only bot possible here would be one pressing buttons for things it never observed. Bring four people at least; six or eight is better.
Does everybody need good English?
The deck is written so that they do not. Three hundred everyday cards, chosen so that the person playing in their second language is not quietly the one who loses — which is a real constraint on a game whose whole mechanic is banned vocabulary.
Does anybody have to install anything to play Forbidden Words?
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 Forbidden Words?
4 to 12 — best with six or eight. A room seats up to 12.
How long does a game of Forbidden Words take?
About 15 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.
Credit where it is due
Adapted from Taboo, designed by Brian Hersch and published by Hasbro. The deck here is our own.