What are some fun language-based games?

Question

An acquaintance of mine is looking for some games that he can play with his family. They enjoy language games like Scrabble. We have already discussed Balderdash, Fictionary, Mad Gab, and Quiddler. Do you have any more recommendations along these lines?

Answer 1

Word Yahtzee is another good one. There are 7 letter dice with numerical values like on Scrabble tiles. You get 3 rolls like regular yahtzee to form one of the following: 3, 4, 5, or 6 letter word; 7 letter yahtzee word; all vowels; all consonants; 2 words; or 3 words.

My family also recently learned a new variation on Scrabble called "Take One." Each player starts with 7 tiles and everyone turns them over at once to build their own Scrabble-like layouts without the board. When somebody successfully arranges all their tiles into their layout they say tell everyone to "take one." Everyone continues to build their layouts in this manner, rearranging as necessary, until all the tiles have been used. Once somebody is completely finished everyone has 10 seconds to tack on any loose tiles they have. Then everybody adds up their points for all the words in their layout.

Answer 2

Scrabble is an amazing language, word and vocabulary enhancing word game. For more than 5 decades it has been the NUMBER ONE word game on a global scale.

Recent estimates suggest that there are over 50 million Scrabble lovers today. An excellent site for the free Scrabble word game is www.scrabulous.com. At Scrabulous you can play Scrabble for free as well as search their online Scrabble dictionary and even upload your profile with a picture.

Answer 3

We have a game we make up called STOP! They play is that your are given a letter of the alphabet. You have to think up a word that starts with that letter for each catagory.

The catagories are usually: First name, Last name, city, state, country, flower, animal, fruit (vegetables and fungi included); book (or movie title) and then your total

Scoring can be a bit tricky. If you have four people playing...if a person comes up with a word for the catagory, and no one else has it.....that person gets 40 pts; if you all come up with a different word that still sastifies the catgory, it's 15; people have the same word, it's just 5 points. The tricky part is calculating the point values, if there are more than four people.

Personally, I like to through some challenging ones for extra points, like words with a different silent letter! Think of words with a silent A, silent B, silent C.....silent Z LOL Those should be worth double the points!

Good luck with STOP!

Answer 4

Mad Libs are cool. (Name, say, a present participle of an intransitive verb, a prepostion, a concrete noun, two adjectives and an animal. Then the other person fills in the blanks with these and you end up with a sentence like:
While I was (dancing) (above) the (school), I saw a (giant) (happy) (octopus).

Categories (I think it's available in a box called "Scattergories" but you don't really need the box): Write down six categories of things numbered 1-6 (countries, animals, body parts, whatever) and then one person picks a letter and rolls a die and then everyone (as a team or each writing them down) comes up with as many words as possible in that category starting with that letter.

A lot of games can be adapted for multilingual families, if that's the situation here. We play trilingual Scrabble, where if a word is a different word in two or three of the languages, you get double points. (So like FINGER means finger in English and German, that's one word, but TON means "your" in French, but ton in English, so you get double points.

Answer 5

Boggle and Taboo are other ones we like too.
Boggle- old game...you have to shake up dice that have letters on them...then you write down how may word you can make out of the letters on top of the dice...the person with the most wins.
Taboo- newer game...you have to get your team mate to say the word on your card without using the taboo words on the same car

Answer 6

Pictionary is fun.