No Words — A Zoom Game

The game I created to be played over Zoom is called “No Words”, and is based on a game called Ghost. The objective of the game is to type letters in the zoom chat and try not to be the first person to complete a correct spelling of a word. However, the person must be trying to spell a word.

Rules:

The game is played by two people, and one person starts by typing a letter into the zoom chat. The players then continue going back and forth, typing letters into the zoom chat, trying not to spell a word. However, it’s in the player’s best interest to try to get the other person to spell a word. For example, if the first player typed “c” and the second player typed “a”, the first player could feel cornered into typing “t”, spelling “cat” and losing the game. The entire time, both players must have a word in mind that they’re trying to spell. In the example with “ca”, if the next player types the word “z”, the opposing player could call their bluff. If the player did in fact not have a word in mind, they’d lose the game. Single letters like “I” and “a” do not count as words.

This is an example zoom chat:

If Adesuwa didn’t have a word in mind, she would’ve lost the round. However, she had the correct word in mind, so she won!

When I was playtesting this game, I noticed that people were very careful about what counted as a word. For example, someone didn’t realize that “an” was a word when they were playing and they lost that round. I also noticed that once people got the hang of the game, they were more competitive in playing. Even though it’s a pretty simple game, it was really fun to design for the zoom format and playtest!