Trapwords

Trapwords takes a time-honoured party game standard – guess my word – and adds some neat twists, within a simple dungeon-crawling setting.

Players split into a red team and a blue team (at least two people on each). Both teams will progress through a number of rooms, some with curses, finally facing off against a boss monster at the end. But despite the theme, the gameplay itself is all about guessing words.

In each round, a word for each team is secretly chosen, and one person on each team will be the clue-giver. Both teams now get to look at their opponents’ word, and then secretly write down some ‘trapwords’. These are words the clue-giver may not use; but the cluer doesn’t know what they are. The timer is flipped, and one team begins, whilst the other team listen out for the trapwords. the clue-giver can usually give as many clues as they want, though the rest of the team can only take five guesses at the word. If they correctly guess, they win, and progress to the next room – if they run out of time, or guesses, or a trapword is uttered, they lose. If neither team is successful, meaning no-one moves nearer to the boss monster, the monster moves a room closer, ensuring that the game never exceeds 8 rounds in total.

The rooms have some special effects of their own – they allow progressively more trapwords to be picked by your opponents, and some are ‘cursed’, meaning they impose an extra restriction on the players. The curse might be ‘Petrification’ – as soon as your team have made their first guess, the clue-giver may not speak; or Feeblemind, forcing the cluer to user only nouns. The boss monster fight at the end will simply be another word guessing round, but each monster has a further restriction – for instance only three guesses, or cluing with a restricted number of words.

The first team to fight the monster wins – if both teams fight in the same round and both win, the winners are the team who guessed fastest. If both lose the monster wins.

Trapwords is a nice spin on traditional word-guessing games, particularly Taboo – but has some clever spins that keep everyone involved throughout, and a gently fantastical theme that is careful not to dominate proceedings.