How to play Last Word

One of you reads, and it goes round

Each round, one person is the judge. They play nothing: their whole job is to read the finished sentences out and say which one they liked. There is no right answer, there is no appeal, and there is nothing to argue with afterwards — that is the entire scoring system, and it is why the game is worth playing more than once with the same people.

The job moves one chair every round and the sitting ends when it has been all the way round, so everybody gets exactly one turn at deciding. That is not pacing, it is fairness: if the scoring rule is somebody's taste, then a sitting that stopped short would have given some tastes more turns than others.

Six cards, and one of them goes in the hole

Everybody except the judge holds six cards and plays one into the blank. Nothing is typed, so nobody has to be fast or funny on demand — the cards are already funny or already flat, and what you are choosing is which of the six does the most damage to this particular sentence.

Some prompts have two blanks. On those you pick two cards and the order you pick in is the order the sentence reads in, which is a second decision and usually the one that decides the round. Hands are topped back up before the next prompt, so a card spent is a card gone.

Nobody's name is on anything until it is over

The cards go face down. Nothing crosses the wire until every one of them is in, so the last person to play cannot see what they are up against, and nobody can watch the room make its mind up.

Then all of them go up at once, shuffled, with no author attached — for the whole table, not only for the judge, because at a real table the judge reads them out and everybody laughs before the verdict lands. The shuffle is done by the game rather than by the screen, and no answer carries a name until the round is finished. Without that the game slowly stops being about the cards and starts being about who is friends with whom.

The judge is allowed to like none of them

"None of these" is a real answer with a real consequence: nobody takes the round. The same thing happens if the judge lets the clock run out, and nothing is chosen on their behalf — it is the one decision this software will never make for somebody, because a point awarded on nobody's opinion is not the point this game pays.

Everything else is covered. Nobody is knocked out, nobody sits a round out, somebody arriving late is dealt in at the next prompt, and if a connection drops while the window is open the top of that hand goes in unchosen — which is, reliably, funnier than it has any right to be.

The deck

Every prompt and every card is written for this product. The rules the writing works under are short and absolute: nothing about a person's body, no slurs, nothing about a group of people, no politics, no religion, and nothing that reads as a remark about somebody in the room. A card supplies a thing and the sentence supplies the joke, which is why the cards are specific — a goose with a grudge rather than a bird.

That is a real constraint and it shows: what is left is objects, weather, animals, and the small disappointments of buildings and public transport. It also turns out to be where most of the laughs were, because a card that is already a punchline wins every sentence it is played into and flattens the game.

Questions people ask

Is this the offensive one?

No, and not by a filter either. The deck is written from scratch for this product under a short list of rules — nothing about anybody's body, no slurs, nothing about a group of people, no politics, no religion, nothing that reads as a remark about somebody at the table. What is left is objects, weather, animals and things going wrong in buildings, and it is funnier than the constraint sounds. The mechanic is the part that was worth adapting; the content never was.

Does the judge know whose card is whose?

No. The answers arrive shuffled and unsigned, and no name is attached to any of them until the round is decided. That is done in the engine rather than in the display, so there is nothing on any screen — the judge's included — that could be read to work it out. The names go on the moment the verdict is in, because half the fun is finding out who played the one that won.

What if I am not funny?

You are choosing between six cards you did not write, so the worst that happens is that you pick the wrong one of six. Nothing is typed and there is no time pressure to be clever — and the cards that win are very often the ones somebody played because they had nothing better, which is a recurring feature rather than an accident.

How long does it take with twelve people?

Longer than with six, and it is worth knowing before you deal. The sitting runs one round per person so everybody gets a turn at judging, which at twelve is twelve rounds and nearer twenty minutes than fifteen. Six is the size it is best at: enough answers on the board for the judge to have a real choice, few enough that reading them out does not become the round.

Can we play with a machine making up the numbers?

No, and it is not a gap we intend to close. The scoring rule of this game is one person's preference — a stand-in in the reader's chair would be awarding real points on the strength of nobody's opinion, and one in a playing chair would be putting cards on the board that the table then has to react to. Three people is the floor and it works properly at three.

Does anybody have to install anything to play Last Word?

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 Last Word?

3 to 12 — best with six. A room seats up to 12.

How long does a game of Last Word 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.