What you need
Three people minimum, eight maximum, and a phone. Open play.tipzzle.com, tap the colours of whoever is playing, and put the phone flat in the middle of the table.
Two settings before you start, and the phone remembers both: which word list you are playing on — general, sport, holidays, cooking or nature — and how many clues each person will write, from one to three. Neither changes a rule.
A long press on a colour puts a first name on it. That is optional: the game calls you by your colour, and a colour is easier to shout than a name when the phone has to move.
Nothing else is asked. No account, no email, no connection. Once the page is open you can turn the network off.
The round
Each round, one colour guesses. The phone names them and asks them to look away. They put the phone down and stop looking at it.
Everyone else sees the mystery word for a few seconds, then it is gone. That is the only moment it is on screen.
Then the phone goes round. It shows in very large letters who to pass it to. Each person picks it up, types their clues — one word per clue, no space, as many clues as the table asked for — then puts the phone back in the middle, face down.
The pass round the table happens once per round, not once per clue: you write your two or three words one after the other, then hand it on.
Nobody sees what the others wrote. It is the only secret the game has, and passing from hand to hand is what keeps it.
The cancellation
When everybody has written, the phone comes back to the middle, face up. It shows the clues, then blows up the duplicates.
Two people who wrote the same word just cancelled it twice over. Three people, three clues gone. The guesser will never see them.
The phone does not look at who wrote it, it looks at what is written: writing the same idea twice is cancelling yourself out. At two or three clues each, that is the trap of the second word.
Two clues are the same if, in lower case with no accents or punctuation, they come out spelled alike — the plural counts as the singular, and -e, -es and -er count as one. Nothing else: no synonyms, no stemming.
The whole game is right there: write what the others will not. The obvious clue is the one three people have already typed.
The answer
The guesser reads what is still standing and says one thing, out loud. Or passes.
Got it: the word is won. Wrong: the word is lost, and the next one goes in the bin with it — it will not even be played. Passed: the word is lost, and that is all.
That is what makes a wrong answer cost more than no answer. A table that tries everything ends up below a table that knows when to give up.
The end
Thirteen words, and the game stops. The score is the number of words won.
Then the phone hands out the titles: The Cliché, The Visionary, The Lone Wolf, The Compass, The Jinx, The Twins. Each carries its number, and the list of thirteen words is one tap away — a title can be checked, not just taken.
The best score is kept in the phone, and nowhere else.
The game then offers a poster to share, with the score and the link. It shows up before it goes: what you see is exactly what leaves, and nothing leaves unasked.
The one tip that changes a game: the first word that comes to you is the one three other people have already typed. Wait for the second. And when you write two, do not take them from the same family — you will cancel yourself out.