Photo: Susan Holt Simpson on Unsplash
A random letter, no arguing
In the classic list game, picking the letter can start a debate of its own. The usual way: one person runs through the alphabet in their head until someone yells “Stop!” It works, but sooner or later somebody suspects the reciter of stopping on a letter they like. The wheel settles it. It spins, slows down, hovers between M and N, then stops. The letter appears in big type under the wheel, and everyone sees it at the same moment.
The wheel comes loaded with the 20 most playable letters. We took out K, Q, W, X, Y and Z, which can leave the whole table staring at a blank sheet. Up for a challenge? Load “All 26 letters.” Playing with young kids? “Easy letters” keeps only letters that start lots of everyday words.
How to play the classic list game
Sometimes called Categories, or Name, Place, Animal, Thing, the game needs one sheet of paper and one pencil per player. Before you start, agree on five to eight categories, and have everyone write them down the side of their sheet. Classic picks:
- a first name
- a country or city
- an animal
- a food
- a job
- something in your house
- a color
Spin the wheel. As soon as the letter shows up, everyone races to find a word starting with that letter for each category. With a T, that might be Tyler, Toronto, turtle, tacos, teacher, toaster, turquoise. The round ends when the first player fills every line and calls “Stop!”, or when a timer runs out, usually after one or two minutes. Pencils down, even mid-word.
Keeping score
The most common way to score:
- 2 points for an answer nobody else wrote
- 1 point for a good answer that someone else also wrote
- 0 points for a blank line or an answer the table rejects
Go through the answers one category at a time, each player reading in turn. If someone questions an answer (an animal that doesn’t exist, a made-up job), the table votes. Add up the round, spin for the next letter, and play as many rounds as you planned: five or ten makes a nice game.
Plenty of families play it differently. Some give 10 points for a unique answer and 5 for a shared one. Others give a bonus to whoever called “Stop!”, as long as every one of their answers holds up. With young kids, you can also accept words that contain the letter anywhere, not just at the start. Whatever you choose, agree on it before the first round. To keep everyone’s totals, the score counter does the math for you.
Category ideas to copy
For kids: an animal, a fruit, a toy, a name from your class, something at school, a fairy-tale character, a sport.
For grown-ups: a movie, a dish, a U.S. city, a job, an excuse for being late, something you pack for vacation, a word with more than eight letters.
Holiday edition: a gift, something on the holiday table, something you hang on the tree, a winter word, a made-up name for one of Santa’s elves. The elf names usually get the biggest laughs.
Never land on the same letter twice
Every letter gets exactly the same share of the wheel, so the same chance of coming up. The moment you tap, the site picks the winning letter with your browser’s secure random generator, then spins the wheel so it lands right there. Nobody can aim for a letter.
Chance has no memory, though: S can come up two rounds in a row, which is a lot less fun. Check the option to remove the winning slot: after each spin, the “Remove this slot” button takes the letter you just played off the wheel, and the next round gets a fresh one.
Letter games for the classroom and for playing apart
In class, put the wheel up on the projector and you have a vocabulary game going in seconds:
- A class list game with categories from the lesson: a farm animal, a verb, a state capital.
- Letter hunt for little ones: spin a letter, trace it, then find something in the room that starts with it.
- Letter quiz: each team has to answer with a word that starts with the letter. With the quiz buzzer, you know right away who answered first. Our guide to hosting a quiz night has more ideas.
Playing from different homes over a video call? Tap “Send my wheel” to share it by WhatsApp, text message or a copied link, and your friends get the same wheel on their phone. Each round, a different player spins and calls out the letter. The slots travel inside the link: nothing is stored on the server, and nobody needs an account.
For the rest of the evening, the number wheel picks a random number, the dare wheel takes care of whoever lost, and the truth or dare wheel keeps things lively. The spin the wheel page takes any slots you want, and every other picker is on the Buzzloo home page.