Riya's secret word is REFRIGERATOR. Fridge, cold, and kitchen are banned — she has exactly five other words to work with.
The hook
Charades and its descendants all have the same failure mode: someone just says the obvious word and the round's over in two seconds. Five Words Exactly closes that loophole from both ends. The app bans the three most obvious words up front, and it caps the clue at exactly five words — not "keep it short," but a hard, counted five. That constraint is the entire comedy engine: watching Riya route around "fridge," "cold," and "kitchen" to land on "hums, keeps milk from spoiling" is funnier than any clue that just cheats its way to the answer.
A sample round
Hand the phone to Riya — she'll see the word and the banned list
1 · Riya secretly sees REFRIGERATOR, banned: fridge, cold, kitchen
2 · Riya builds her clue, counted word by word
3 · Guesses fly; Mom nails it flat and fast
How a round plays
- The clue-giver secretly sees a thing to describe, plus three words the app has banned as too obvious.
- They write a description using exactly five words — no more, no fewer, and none of the banned words.
- All five words are revealed to the group at once; everyone shouts guesses.
- First correct guess scores a point for the guesser and the clue-giver.
- Pass the phone; the next clue-giver gets a new secret thing and a fresh banned list.
Why it's sticky
The exact-five-word cap forces genuinely strange, creative phrasing every single round, which is where the laughs live — nobody describes a refrigerator as "hums, keeps milk from spoiling" on purpose, but the constraint makes it happen. The banned-word list levels the field between the player who'd just blurt the answer and the one who has to work for it, so a seven-year-old with a lucky guess can beat a parent who's still overthinking. And the guessing phase is genuinely eyes-and-ears fast, which keeps everyone in the round instead of just the clue-giver.
Modes
- Classic — full object deck, standard three-word ban, shout-to-guess.
- Kids mode — easier, more concrete objects, no banned words.
- Team relay — clue-giver rotates within a team; team scores together.
Build notes
Size: S. The shared shell provides the pass-the-phone hidden-info reveal, the guess/reveal screen, and the scorebar. Game-specific work is the object dataset with a precomputed "three most obvious words" ban list per entry, and an exact-word-count validator on clue submission (splitting on whitespace, rejecting anything but exactly five, and checking none of the five match a banned word). Clue and scoring state lives in a plain JS module, so a future "guess by link" async mode — friends submit guesses remotely before the reveal — reuses the same validator and scoring untouched.