Charades

Charades is a style of multiplayer party guessing game in which one player or team has a piece of information that they are attempting to indirectly communicate to another player or team. Often, this information is a word or phrase that must be communicated through nonverbal means, such as physically acting out an action or drawing a picture. One of the more typical formats for charades games is one in which a single player acts or draws out a picture meant to represent a word, and all of the other players compete to guess it the quickest. However, this setup is not rigid and teams can realistically be any size in a charades-style game.

Traditionally, charades is a party game where one player silently acts out a word, and other players attempt to guess it. This type of charades can still be seen in video games such as Heads Up! (2013) and ACT IT OUT! A Game of Charades (2016). The template of charades would go on to influence the board game Pictionary (which has, itself, been adapted into video game form multiple times), where players would draw words instead of physically acting them out. Pictionary would go onto influence many separate charades-style video games such as Draw Something (2012), Drawful 2 (2016), and Gartic Phone (2020).