How to Play Taboo Online

You start a game by making a room and sharing its code. Everyone plays on their own phone, tablet or computer, and talks over a call or in the same room.

1. The host opens the home page, picks a word pack and creates a room.
2. Friends type the 6-character room code (letters and digits) on the home page, or open the invite link, and pick a name.
3. The host splits the room into teams with Randomize or Draft, or players pick a team themselves.
4. The host checks the game settings in the lobby and presses Start.

Joining a room needs no account. Hosting needs a free account, which includes a monthly allowance of games, unless the home page says hosting is open to guests.

Teams take turns. On each turn one player is the describer and sees a board of words, 10 at the start of the turn. The describer explains the words out loud, in any order, without saying any word on the board. Teammates type their guesses into the guess box.

Saying any word on the board is a slip, including a word you have not reached yet and a piece of a longer word. Saying "flower" while Sunflower is on the board counts. Groups usually also ban spelling out letters, rhymes and "sounds like" clues; agree on those before the first turn.

Guessers see blank tiles that show only each word's difficulty and points. Players on the other teams see the real words, so they can follow along and catch slips. The describer cannot type in the room chat during their own turn.

The team with the most points after the last round wins. Equal top scores are shown as a tie.

• A room plays with one, two or three teams. One team needs at least 2 players, two teams need 4 and three teams need 6.
• One team is a co-operative game: players take turns describing to everyone else and play for a high score.
• Randomize deals players evenly into teams. Draft lets two captains pick players in turn, and a coin flip decides who picks first.
• The host or a team's captain can rename a team from its card. The host can also lock the room so no one new can join.
• A game lasts 3, 6, 9 or 12 rounds; new rooms start at 12. In each round every team plays one turn, in team order.
• A turn lasts 30 seconds, 60 seconds or 90 seconds; new rooms start at 60. The clock starts only when the describer presses Start turn.
• Guesses that arrive in the 2-second grace period after the clock runs out still count.
• The describer role passes to the next teammate after every turn, so everyone gets to describe.

Each word is worth points by difficulty, shown on its tile, so the describer can choose between quick easy words and slower big ones. Longer and more abstract words sit higher in their tier's range.

• A correct guess adds the word's full points to your team. Wrong guesses cost nothing, so keep typing.
• A near miss earns half points. A guess counts as near when it is at least 85% similar to a board word letter by letter, which in practice means one slip in a word of seven letters or more. Only the first near miss on a word adds to the team score, and a later exact guess swaps the half points for full points.
• Bonus words reward a fast run. The 6th exact guess in a turn adds 3 words to the board, then every 4 more exact guesses (at 10, 14, 18 and so on) add 5. Later batches bring more medium and hard words.
• Half-point guesses do not count toward bonus words, and bonus words never arrive during the grace period.
• Spaces, hyphens and capital letters do not matter: "ice cream", "ice-cream" and "ICECREAM" are the same guess.

In Classic there is no skip button and no skip penalty. To skip a word, stop describing it and move to another tile; words you never reach cost nothing. Forbidden mode has a Skip button that costs 5 points, described below.

Before a turn starts, the describer can press Skip my turn to hand the turn to the next teammate with no points lost. It helps when someone has stepped away. It is not available in ranked games or on a team of one.

When the host turns on Taboo reporting, the other teams act as referee. A player who hears the describer say a board word taps that tile to report it, and the slip is confirmed once a majority of the watching players report it: 2 of 3 watchers, or 3 of 4.

With Taboo voting also on, a confirmed report goes to a 30-second vote at the end of the turn instead of counting at once. Everyone in the game can vote, and the slip stands only with at least 60% yes votes among the votes cast.

The penalty is the word itself: a confirmed slip takes that word's points back from the describing team, or the half points if it was only a near miss. A reported word that nobody guessed simply drops off at the end of the turn, so a slip never costs more than the word was worth.

Reporting and voting are off by default in casual rooms, and the host switches them on in the lobby. Ranked games always use both.

Two optional lobby settings use the speech recognition built into your browser. Both listen for English only and work best in Chrome; some browsers have no speech recognition at all.

• The describer voice check listens to the describer's microphone and flags a board word as soon as it is said. It matches whole words, with or without an ending, so "pens" flags Pen but "open" does not, and either half of a compound counts: with Swordfish on the board, "sword" or "fish" flags it. A flag confirms the slip at once, with no report and no vote, and the word's points come straight off if it was already guessed.
• Guesser voice lets each guesser turn on their own microphone. Each phrase they say becomes one guess and goes through the same check as typed guesses, so say single words with a pause between them.
• Guesser voice is not offered for the Hindi packs, and the microphone button does not appear in the Discord Activity.
• On a call, guessers should wear headphones; otherwise their microphone can pick up the describer's clues and send them as guesses.

Every room plays one of two modes, Classic and Forbidden. Classic is the game described above: the words on the board are the only words the describer must avoid. Forbidden mode plays like the card game. Instead of a board of ten tiles, the describer works through big cards, and every card, bonus cards included, comes with five forbidden words that the describer may not say either. If the host sets Forbidden words to 3 in the lobby, each card shows only its three most obvious ones.

The host picks the mode when creating a casual room, or changes it in the lobby before the game starts. Ranked rooms play Classic. Forbidden mode works with the built-in packs only, not custom or shop packs: picking it with a custom or shop pack selected switches to the Standard pack, and the word pack list then shows only the built-in packs, under their Forbidden names, such as Forbidden - Easy.

There are 3 cards on show at a time, and the describer picks which one to describe. When a card is guessed, the next card slides in from the queue. The describer can also skip a card: it leaves at once, the next card slides in, and the skip costs the describing team 5 points. A skipped card does not come back that turn. Guesses count on only the cards on show, never on cards still in the queue, and when the queue runs out the game deals more.

The describer and the other team see the forbidden words on each card; the guessers never see them, only a ??? card with its difficulty and points. A forbidden word said aloud is a slip on its card, exactly like saying the word itself. With the describer voice check on, the microphone listens for the forbidden words too. Without the mic, the other team taps the card to report it when Taboo reporting is on, and Taboo voting settles close calls.

A guesser on the playing team can buy a hint for a word the team has not guessed yet. Hints cost coins from the buyer's own wallet, never team points, so they need a signed-in account. The describer cannot buy hints.

A hint shows only on the screen of the player who bought it, so that player should type the answer or read the pattern out. The length hint shows a gap between words, which tells you at once that an answer such as Extension cord has two parts.

There are 12 built-in packs drawn from 6,109 English words and 1,856 Hindi words written in Roman letters.

• Standard mixes easy, medium and hard English words (5,066 words). A 10-word board usually holds more easy and medium words than hard ones, such as 4 easy, 4 medium and 2 hard.
• Difficult adds the insane tier (6,109 words), and Intense keeps only hard and insane words (3,334).
• Easy, Medium, Hard and Insane each play a single tier.
• Hindi mixes the three Hindi tiers (1,856 words), and Hindi Easy, Medium and Hard play one tier each. Hinglish mixes English and Hindi words (6,922).
• Custom word packs hold your own words in the same four tiers. A pack needs at least 10 words in each tier it uses. Custom packs are for casual rooms only.

Here is one 60-second turn in a two-team game with reporting and voting on. Asha describes for Team 1, Ben and Chen guess, and the three players of Team 2 watch. The board shows 10 words: Penguin 7, Volcano 8, Umbrella 8 and Airport 7 (easy), Toothbrush 20, Sunflower 21, Windmill 19 and Thunder 19 (medium), and Curriculum 32 and Cowardice 32 (hard).

1. Asha presses Start turn and opens with the three easiest words. Penguin, Volcano and Umbrella fall in the first 15 seconds: 23 points.
2. For Toothbrush, Ben types "toothbrus". Nine of ten letters match, which is 90% similar, so the team gets half points: 10. Chen types "toothbrush" and the 10 becomes the full 20. Team 1 has 43.
3. Airport takes the score to 50. Then Asha calls Sunflower "a tall yellow flower that turns to face the sun", and Ben gets it: 71 points and the sixth exact guess, so 3 bonus words drop onto the board.
4. Two of Team 2's three watchers heard "flower" and "sun", both pieces of Sunflower, and tap its tile. Two of three is a majority, so the slip is confirmed and held for the vote.
5. Windmill (19) and Bicycle, an 8-point bonus word, take Team 1 to 98. The clock runs out while Chen is typing "curriculum", but the guess lands inside the 2-second grace period and counts: 130.
6. In the 30-second vote, 4 players vote yes and 2 vote no on Sunflower. That is 67%, above the 60% needed, so its 21 points come off.

Team 1 ends the turn with 109 points. Thunder, Cowardice and the two unused bonus words cost nothing. Had the vote split 3 to 3, only 50% would have said yes, and the 21 points would have stayed.

The game ends after the last round, once every team has played it. There is no target score and no tiebreak round.

The results screen shows each team's score and three awards: MVP for the highest total contribution, Top guesser for the most words guessed and Top describer for the most words described. Play again takes everyone back to the lobby of the same room. In a casual room the host can also end the game early, and the results then say it was ended early.

The word packs grow from players. During a game, Suggest a word sends a new word with the difficulty you think it deserves, and the small info button on a word tile reports a word whose difficulty feels wrong.

Bugs, feature ideas and rule questions go to our Discord server, which the developer reads and answers.