Pocket Games
Hangman
In English the most common letter is E, and the first six — e, t, a, o, i, n — cover well over half of any text. Anyone guessing with whatever consonants come to mind starts with a handicap no amount of luck makes up for.
The rules
There is a hidden word and you see only the empty squares. You propose a letter: if it is there, it appears in every position it occupies; if it is not, another piece is added to the drawing. When the drawing is finished, you have lost.
Pocket Games has three difficulties, and they change not only the length of the word but how many mistakes you are allowed:
- Easy: words of 5-6 letters and 8 mistakes, because the gallows gets built too, so the first two errors are nearly free.
- Medium: words of 7-9 letters and 6 mistakes, with the gallows already standing. This is the classic setup.
- Hard: words of 10-14 letters and 5 mistakes, because both arms appear in a single error.
The record saved is the lowest number of mistakes you have guessed a word with, for each difficulty. On a computer you can use the physical keyboard.
There is also a two-player mode on the same phone: one writes the word, the other guesses, then you swap. Points are the lives you have left, so whoever guesses with fewer mistakes wins. And that is how this game was born, on a sheet of paper.
The right order of letters in English
This is the whole game. English letter frequencies are heavily skewed, and playing along with them changes your results outright.
The vowels, in this order: e, a, o, i, u. E alone accounts for around one letter in eight of written English.
Then the consonants, in this order: t, n, s, r, h, l, d, c, m.
Avoid at the start: j, q, x, z, k, v, w. They are rare, and each one is close to a guaranteed mistake while the word is still fully covered.
A good opening run is e, t, a, o, i, n: six letters that leave only two or three possibilities standing in the vast majority of English words.
How to reason once the word takes shape
Look at the endings. English words very often end in -s, -ing, -ed, -y or -tion. If you already have the last letter, you know a great deal about the tense and the number of the word.
Think in clusters. English has combinations that travel together: after a Q there is almost always a U; TH, CH, SH, NG and QU come as pairs. Find one half and the other is free.
Long words are easier, not harder. That is the hangman paradox: a twelve-letter word contains almost all the common letters, and after five vowels it reads itself. Short words are the dangerous ones, because a wrong consonant costs you a life and gives you nothing back.
Playing head to head: how to pick a nasty word
It is not the long word, as everyone assumes. It is the short word with rare letters: five or six letters with a J, a Z or a Q in them are a nightmare, because your opponent does not have enough squares to reconstruct the structure and every miss costs.
Frequently asked questions
How many wrong letters can I afford?
Eight on easy, six on medium, five on hard. Hard is stricter precisely because it has the longest words.
Do the words have accents?
Not in English — the whole list is plain A to Z. In the other languages of the app some words do carry accents, and there the keyboard still has 26 letters: pressing A also reveals À, pressing C reveals Ç. An accented letter always counts as its base letter.
Can I guess the whole word at once?
In this game you propose letters, not whole words. Which is a good thing: it removes the gamble and leaves only the reasoning.
Can two people play on the same phone?
Yes, and it is the best mode: one enters the word, the other guesses, and the lives left are counted as points.
More games to try
See the full list of games, or open Pocket Games in your browser: they are free and you don’t need an account.