Space start / pause · → skip word
Describe the word without saying it, and pass it on before the buzzer. Spin, talk fast, and do not get caught holding it.
Space start / pause · → skip word
Paste your list below, one item per line
Catchphrase belongs to a small family of party games where the pressure comes from a countdown you cannot see the end of. You are not really racing to describe the word — you are racing to get rid of the device, which means describing the word well enough that someone guesses fast. That second-order goal is what makes it frantic in a way ordinary word games are not.
The buzzer here escalates the same way the rest of the site’s timers do: it ticks the last five seconds and dings at zero. In a passing game the audio matters more than the display, because nobody in the circle is looking at the screen except whoever is holding it.
The instinct under pressure is to describe what a thing looks like. That is usually the slow route. Function gets guessed faster than appearance — “you clean your teeth with it” lands quicker than “it is small and plastic with bristles”, because the room only has to match one idea rather than assemble a picture.
The other reliable trick is context over object. For traffic light, describing the junction gets there faster than describing the pole. Give the room the situation the word lives in, and the word tends to arrive on its own.
Catchphrase is played with a handheld device that picks a word and hides a timer, which is almost exactly what a spinning wheel with an automatic countdown is. The spin gives everyone the moment of not knowing what is coming, and because the clock starts on its own there is no fumbling between the word appearing and the round being live.
It also fixes the one thing the physical game cannot do: the word list is yours. The original comes with a fixed vocabulary that a regular group exhausts within a few sessions. Here you can load twenty new words in ten seconds, which is the difference between a game people play once and one they come back to.