Charades bowl

The bowl, without the bowl

Charades at home usually starts with ten minutes of everybody writing on torn-up paper, and ends with an argument about whose turn it was and how long they had. This page is the whole game on one screen: the slips, the clock, the scores and whose go it is. Press start, the actor peeks, and the room sees nothing but the timer running down.

If you would rather have real paper in a real bowl, the charades cards page prints the same six sets as cut-out cards. The two are meant to be used together: print for the party, use this for the evening somebody suggests a game at nine o'clock.

The three-round game, explained

The best version of charades is not charades. Put the same slips through three rounds: in the first you may say anything except the words on the slip, in the second you get exactly one word, and in the third you may not speak at all. The bowl refills between rounds with the same slips, so by round three a single raised eyebrow is enough and the room is shouting the answer before the actor has moved.

The page keeps the rule for the round on screen so nobody has to remember which one they are in, refills the bowl when it empties, and stops after the third round with the scores as they stand. Switch back to classic charades and the bowl simply refills whenever it runs dry.

Hosting it so everybody plays

Sixty seconds is the right turn for most rooms; drop to thirty with older children who know the sets, and go to ninety if the group is shy or the prompts are long. Skip puts a slip back in the bowl rather than binning it, so a turn that gets stuck costs time instead of content, and the slip comes round again for somebody else.

Two teams is enough and four is the most that keeps everybody awake between turns. For the drawing version of the same evening the pictionary generator works identically, and the scoreboard takes over if you want fuller standings across several games.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.bowl.custom, pph.bowl.teams, pph.bowl.round and pph.bowl.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.