About

Taboo

Taboo is a party game for around 4 to 10 people split into 2 teams. Each round, a player from a team becomes the giver and the rest of the team become guessers. The opposing team act as monitors.

The giver is given a card containing a word and 5 taboo words. The giver must somehow tell the guessers about the word without mentioning the word itself or any of the 5 taboo words. The monitors act as judges to see if any of the words said are not allowed.

If a guesser gets the word right, the team earns a point. If the giver says any taboo word, the team loses a point. The giver may also choose to pass and the team also loses a point. The giver is then given another card and this continues until the round time runs out.

Additional notes

When there are enough players, the giver is announced and he can start the game by pressing the Start button. Normally, taboo rounds are 1 minute long, but we extend it to 2 minutes because of the time it takes to type things.

The system can rudimentarily act as a monitor itself. If the giver types out any of the taboo words verbatim, the system immediately calls taboo on those. It can also check if the word was guessed correctly assuming it was spelled correctly. For all other cases, we will rely on the monitors and the giver to act in good faith.

To facilitate faster playing, there are some command you can just type in:

  • /s - Start the round
  • /p - Pass
  • /c - Correct (someone got the word)
  • /t - Taboo

What is this?

Hi! This is just a side project I made where you can play Taboo online. I liked playing it with my friends during our Christmas party and I wanted to play a bit more.

Feature-wise, it's a bit sparse. There's no score tracking beyond a single round, but it should at least have the core game mechanics ok. UI/UX could also use a lot of work. I'm also leaving the prospect of adding more games open. Like maybe Pinoy Henyo or whatever.

There aren't that many words yet, and I'd greatly appreciate contributing some for the game. There's also an API for accessing the word list in case you want to build your own Taboo-like thing. GET /cards should give you the entire card list, while GET /cards/random will give you a random card each time.