One of these is the real dictionary definition. Everyone votes blind, and you can't vote for your own.
▶ Play FibberishThe hook
Balderdash's genius was always the same: a real word nobody knows, and the space between "true" and "plausible" where all the comedy lives. Fibberish keeps that engine and modernizes the plumbing — the app has a genuinely deep bank of obscure real words and their real definitions, so nobody has to own a dictionary, and it anonymizes and shuffles submissions automatically so the vote is actually blind. The real drama isn't the word. It's watching Mom's dry, three-word fake definition read out loud in the exact same tone as the real one, and half the table falling for it.
A sample round
Hand the phone to Dad — type your fake definition
1 · GALLIMAUFRY appears; each player secretly writes a fake
2 · All four definitions are read aloud, shuffled and anonymous
3 · Mom's answer was real all along — she scores for every vote she fooled
How a round plays
- The app reveals a genuinely obscure English word nobody at the table actually knows.
- Each player secretly types a fake definition that sounds plausible.
- All the fake definitions, plus the real one, are shuffled together and read out loud, anonymously.
- Everyone votes for the definition they believe is real — you can't vote for your own.
- Score points for finding the true definition, and for every player your fake fooled into voting for it.
Why it's sticky
It rewards a completely different skill than most party games: not speed, not vocabulary, but voice — writing a lie that sounds exactly as confident as the truth. The blind, anonymous vote means the room can't just guess by who's talking, so Mom's flat delivery and Dad's over-elaborate one both get judged purely on the page. And the payoff is built into the format: the real definition of an odd word is often funnier than any fake one, so even losing a vote lands a laugh.
Modes
- Classic — full obscure-word deck, blind vote, standard scoring.
- Kids' words — a gentler word list for younger players, same voting flow.
- Team Fibberish — pairs write one fake definition together, doubling the bluff.
Build notes
Size: S. The shared shell provides the pass-the-phone hidden-info entry screen (each player writes their fake without the others seeing), the voting list-row UI, and the scorebar. Game-specific work is mostly data: a curated deck of genuinely obscure real words paired with their real definitions, plus the shuffle-and-anonymize step that strips authorship before the read-aloud and vote. Submission and scoring state lives in a plain JS module, so a future async mode — friends submit fake definitions remotely via a shared link before the group reads them out later — reuses the same shuffle and scoring logic untouched.