How to play Taboo online with friends: rules, scoring and tips

One player gets a word and has to get the others to say it. The catch is a short list of forbidden words printed under it — for "lighthouse" that might be sea, light, ship, tower and coast — which are exactly the words anyone would reach for first. Describe it without them, against the clock, and everyone who guesses the word scores. Then the next player is up.

That is the whole game, and it is why it works in almost any group: nobody needs to know anything, only to think sideways quickly. It is also why it is one of the few party games that gets better, not worse, over a video call — the explaining is all talk anyway.

At a table, the forbidden words are policed by whoever sits next to the explainer and can see the card. Online there is no next to. Somebody has to hold the card, somebody has to time the turn, and somebody has to notice when "it is like a tower but at the sea" just used two forbidden words. Played over a plain video call, that somebody is usually the host, who then spends the evening refereeing instead of playing.

On omequiz the room does those jobs. The explainer sees the word and its forbidden list on their own screen, nobody else does, the turn runs on a clock, and correct guesses are recognised and scored by themselves. Everyone else just plays.

There are two ways to explain, and a room can mix them. Typed clues are checked before anybody sees them: a line containing a forbidden word is refused, costs the explainer 30 points, and the room is told that a forbidden word was used — not which one, because the forbidden words point straight at the answer. Small changes do not slip through either: "lights" is caught as surely as "light".

Spoken clues over voice chat are faster and much funnier, and no machine listens to them. That is what the buzzer is for. Once you have guessed the word you can see the card too, and if you hear the explainer say a forbidden word you press the buzzer: the explainer loses 30 points. Each player can buzz once per turn, so a slip costs a penalty rather than a pile-on.

Guessing early is worth more, both in order and in time. The first person to get the word earns 100 points for being first plus up to 150 for how much of the turn was left; each later guesser gets 20 fewer for their place in the queue, never less than 50, plus their own speed bonus. The explainer earns 40 for every player who gets there — so explaining well pays, and a turn where the whole room guesses is the explainer's best turn.

A correct guess is never shown to the others. They see that you got it, not what you typed, so the turn stays open for everybody else. Guesses that are nearly right get a private "close" so you know to keep going in that direction; articles, plurals and accents are forgiven, so "the dog" and "dogs" count for "dog", and a German player without an ä on the keyboard can type "Baer" for "Bär".

Each explainer has two skips per turn. Use them early: a word you have no way into is not going to get easier with thirty seconds less on the clock.

Start wide, then narrow. "A building" first, then "you find it on the coast", then "it blinks at night". Each line should cut the list of possible answers in half; a clever but isolated clue that only works once the room is already close is wasted at the start.

Describe a situation instead of the thing. Forbidden words cluster around the obvious definition, and a scene goes around them: for "umbrella" you do not need rain if you can say "you open it when you leave the house and the sky is grey".

Use the gaps people fill in for free. "Snow White and the seven …" gets "dwarfs" without a single forbidden word, and an unfinished phrase is the fastest clue there is.

And when you are stuck, skip. Two skips per turn are there to be spent, and a room watching someone circle one word for a minute is the only really dull moment this game has.

Type a lot and type short. A wrong guess costs nothing, and each one tells the explainer what the room is thinking — which is often exactly the hint they need to steer by. One word per guess is faster than a sentence and gets matched just as well.

Say the category out loud before you have the word. "Is it an animal?" on voice turns a wide clue into a narrow one for everybody, and the explainer can confirm without saying anything forbidden.

Watch for the close marker. It means you are one ending or one letter away, and the right next guess is usually the obvious variation of what you just typed.

Three to eight players is the range where it is best. With two, one explains and one guesses, which works but is a duet; with more than eight, the fast typists take every word and the rest stop trying. Every player explains once per round, and a game is one to three rounds at 60 to 120 seconds a turn — two rounds at 80 seconds is about ten minutes for five people.

Settle the language of the words in the lobby before you start, which is where omequiz asks for it. A guess only counts in the language of the word, and nobody should find out after their turn that "Kuh" was never going to be "cow". The words come from a hand-written list of about 475 cards per language, in three levels the host picks in the lobby: easy is everyday things like "umbrella", medium takes more describing, like "lighthouse", and hard is abstract or rare, like "nostalgia" or "stage fright". Mixed, the default, deals from all three. With that many cards, a round does not repeat itself.

Cameras stay optional. Taboo is a game you can play entirely by chat, by voice with cameras off, or as a full video call — the faces are a bonus, not a requirement.

• Draw and guess online — the drawing version
• Playing online with friends: the full guide

You can play the same game on any video call with a little preparation. Write twenty words with four forbidden words each, send them privately to one player at a time, set a phone timer and keep score on paper. It works, and it shows straight away which jobs the host is now doing — card holder, timekeeper, referee, scorer — instead of playing.

The quickest way to skip all of that: open a room, choose Taboo as the mode, set the language, send the six-character code, and press start once everybody is ready.