Charades generator

What a charades generator should do

A charades generator has one job: put a good word in front of the person who is about to act, fast, and keep doing it until the turn is over. Most generators stop at the first part. They show a word and a button for another word. That works for a quick round with two people, but at a real party it leaves the group to sort out the rest with a phone stopwatch, a scrap of paper for the score, and someone trying to remember which words were already used.

This generator does the whole turn. It draws a random slip from the categories you chose, starts the timer when the slip appears, counts what your team gets, and sets every played slip aside so it does not come back later in the night. When time is up it tells the room the score and whose turn it is. You only need to act.

How the random draw works

When you tap the hat, every slip in your chosen categories goes into a shuffled bag. Each draw takes the next slip out of the bag. A slip you guessed or passed is marked as played on your phone, so the next turn draws from the slips that are left. That is the difference between a hat and a plain random picker: a random picker can show the same word twice in five minutes, a hat cannot. When the hat runs out, it fills up again and says so.

The shuffle uses the Fisher Yates method, the standard way to put a list in a fair random order, so every order of the slips is equally likely. Nothing is sent anywhere; the drawing happens on your own device.

Categories you can mix

There are 10 categories with 450 slips written for this site: Actions, Animals, Jobs, Sports and games, Around the house, Feelings and moods, Little kids, Food and drink, Holidays and seasons, and Hard phrases. Tap as many as you like. A family with young children might pick Little kids, Animals and Food. A group of friends who have played a lot might go straight to Feelings and Hard phrases, where the slips are idioms like "Walking on eggshells" and "Once in a blue moon" that take real acting.

Add your own words

The best charades words are often the ones only your group understands: a teacher's catchphrase, the family dog, the trip everyone remembers. Type them into the box, one per line or separated by commas, and press Fold into the hat. They are mixed in with the categories you picked, and they are kept on your phone for next time. You can add up to 200 of your own slips.

Timer and teams

Choose 30, 60 or 90 second turns, or switch the timer off for little kids who need time. The sand glass runs down beside the clock, the last 5 seconds turn red, and the phone gives a short buzz when time is up, where the phone supports it. Name your teams and the board keeps the score. One point for each slip guessed; a pass costs nothing but time.

When a generator is all you need

Sometimes you only want a list to read from, for a class warm up or to write slips by hand. The charades ideas page has every slip on this site by category, and the charades words page explains which words act well and which do not. If you want to write the slips yourselves and play the three round version, switch the hat to Bowl.

Tips for a better round

• Agree on the hand signals before you start. The hand signals guide has the common ones, like fingers for the number of words and a tug on the ear for "sounds like".
• Keep turns short. 60 seconds keeps everyone watching; 90 suits slow, careful actors.
• Let the actor pass. A slip that does not land after 15 seconds is better skipped than forced.
• Mix one easy category with one hard one, so each turn has a few quick wins.