Forbidden words

The rules, and the one that matters

One player describes the word at the top of the card while their team shouts guesses. They may not say the word itself, any of the five words under it, or any part of those words: no rhyming with them, no spelling them out, no first letters. Somebody from the other team watches the screen over their shoulder and presses buzz the moment a banned word slips out.

That monitor is the job that makes the game. Without one it collapses into an honour system nobody enforces, which is why the buzz button is the second big control on the stage rather than a setting somewhere. It is placed to be pressed by a person leaning in from the side.

In a language classroom

Banning the obvious words is what forces a learner off the obvious sentence. Describing a kettle without boil, tea, water, kitchen or hot means reaching for shape, purpose and comparison instead, which is exactly the vocabulary a lesson is trying to build. Write the cards from this week's list and the game becomes revision that nobody notices.

Turn the buzz penalty off for a class, set the turn to ninety seconds, and let the watching team call the forbidden words out loud rather than press anything. The point there is noticing the banned word, not the score.

Where it sits beside the rest

This is the talking game. The charades bowl is the acting one and the pictionary generator is the drawing one, and all three run the same way: a prompt only one person sees, a clock, and scores on the same screen. An evening that plays all three needs nothing but this device.

Taboo is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc. It is used here only to name the kind of word game this page runs. The cards, the sets and the wording are ours, nothing from anybody's box is reproduced, and PaperCarnival is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Hasbro.

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