Hangman
A word hides behind dashes, and it has to be opened letter by letter faster than the figure is drawn.
One player sets a word and puts a in place of each letter. The other calls out letters one at a time: a right one is written into every place it stands, and a wrong one adds another part to the .
It is a race between two speeds — how fast the word emerges and how fast the drawing runs out. The first letters are almost always vowels: they are frequent, and an opened E or A shows the shape of the word, from which the rest follows.
The setter works the same arithmetic backwards, wanting a word where the common letters are scarce: with rare consonants, with a doubled letter, and preferably short, because in a long word every letter opened gives away more.
Rules of Hangman
The word
The setter chooses a word and draws a dash for each of its letters underneath. The word itself is not shown.
A common noun in the singular is the usual choice. What exactly is allowed — nouns only, any word, proper names — is agreed beforehand; a category may be announced as well: "an animal", "a city".
Room is left beside it for the drawing.
A turn
The guesser names one letter.
It is in the word — the setter writes it into every dash where it stands. The turn continues.
It is not — the setter adds one part to the figure.
A letter called once is pointless to call again: it has either been opened or already paid for with a mistake.
How many mistakes
The number of parts in the drawing is the number of mistakes allowed. It is agreed before the start: six parts — head, body, two arms, two legs — is the commonest count, but more are drawn, beginning with the gallows itself.
End of the game
The guesser wins if the word is opened before the figure is finished. They may also name the whole word at any point rather than waiting for the remaining letters.
The setter wins if the figure was finished first, and must then show the word.
The next game
The guesser usually becomes the setter.
Worth knowing
How many parts the figure has is fixed nowhere: six is common — head, body, two arms, two legs — but eight is met, and up to eleven if the gallows itself is drawn first. It is agreed before the start, because the whole difficulty rests on it. Accounts differ too on which words may be set and whether the first and last letters are opened straight away.
Glossary of terms
- A dash
- A stroke standing in for a letter not yet opened. There are exactly as many as the word has letters, and at the start that is all anybody knows about it.
- The figure
- The drawing added to for every wrong letter. The number of its parts is the number of mistakes you may afford.