Telephone — the rules of the game

Telephone

A phrase is whispered along a line, and at the end what arrived is set against what was said.

The first player whispers a word or a phrase to their neighbour, who passes it on — and so to the end of the . The last says out loud what reached them, and the first says what was sent. The whole game is usually to be found between those two sentences.

It runs on a plain property of whispering: you can mishear, and you may not ask again. Nobody along the way distorts anything on purpose — each honestly repeats what they heard — but a small error at every step accumulates, and by the end a phrase has become anything at all.

The length of the line therefore decides almost everything. Among three players a phrase often arrives whole; past the tenth person it has practically no chance.

Where else it turns up

The game is often shown to children as a demonstration of why a retelling of a retelling should not be taken for first-hand knowledge: many people heard it, each heard it once, and only the one at the front can check.

Adults make it harder on purpose — long phrases, tongue-twisters, words that sound alike — and then the line breaks sooner.

Players3+

CategoriesVerbal games

ObjectivePass the message on as exactly as you can — and see what it became on the way.

Rules of Telephone

How to sit

Players sit in a row or a circle, close enough to whisper into an ear and far enough apart that a whisper does not carry to the neighbours.

The order of passing follows the seating and does not change afterwards.

The message

The player starting thinks of a — a word or a short phrase — and shows it to nobody.

Anything sayable will do: a sensible phrase, a tongue-twister, a string of words. The longer it is and the closer its words sound to one another, the less chance it has of arriving.

Passing it on

The starter whispers the message once, quietly, to their neighbour. That player whispers what they heard to the next, and so to the end of the line.

Two rules hold the game up:

whisper so that only the person receiving it hears;
do not repeat. Each has one chance to hear, and asking again is not allowed.

What is passed on is what was heard. There is no need to work out what was meant and correct an obvious nonsense — the garbling is the game.

End of the round

The last in the line says aloud what reached them. The starter then says the original, and the two are compared.

There is no winner here: the round ends in a comparison, not a score.

The next round

The starter goes to the end of the line, and the next player thinks of a new message. Over a few rounds everybody gets to be both first and last.

Worth knowing

There is usually no winning at all: some descriptions introduce no score, and others send whoever garbled the phrase to the end of the line. The smallest number of players is given as three in some accounts and four in others. What a player who heard nothing whatever should do is nowhere laid down — in practice they pass on what they think they heard, and that counts as part of the game.