Challenge together! A roundup of word games for adults
For example, do you ever find yourself bored during a road trip with friends or at a get-together at someone’s place? If you’ve ever thought, “I wish there were something fun to do in little pockets of free time,” good news! In this article, we’ll introduce word games and activities we recommend for adults.
They’re great for killing time, and many are also fun to dive into more seriously.
They might even serve as a bit of brain training! Be sure to give them a try!
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- [For Adults] Make the Most of Your Free Time! Ideas to Kill Time
- Team-based recreational activities for adults that are fun even with large groups
- Tongue twisters that will make you laugh out loud! Super funny
- [Battle of Wits] Stimulate your intellectual curiosity! Quiz questions that get adults excited
- Games that liven up social and networking gatherings
Challenge together! A roundup of wordplay for adults (1–10)
riddle
Also known as “compound riddles” or “three-step riddles,” nazokake is a wordplay game where the fun lies in the complex rules added to ordinary riddles.
In response to the prompt, “I compare it to XX and interpret it as YY—what’s the reasoning?”, players try to read the questioner’s intent.
You often see it in variety shows during comedy segments.
Because it relies on double meanings and analogies, it calls for not just vocabulary and creativity but also a sense of humor—so a spot-on answer can really get everyone excited.
It’s a form of wordplay that adults can enjoy both by making the problems and by solving them.
senryu
Senryu are colloquial, fixed-form poems written in the familiar 5-7-5 rhythm for Japanese people.
Unlike haiku, they don’t require seasonal words and can be composed in everyday speech, which is why they’ve taken root as approachable forms even today, like “Salaryman Senryu.” Because the theme is free, anyone can make them easily—for example, when you’re killing time with friends, you can compose one based on your current mood or setting.
If possible, try crafting lines with double meanings to make them more compelling.
It’s a fun and recommended wordplay to challenge yourself with.
cumulative song
It’s a word game where you keep adding sentences and developing a story, also known as a never-ending song.
It typically starts with the phrase “This is,” and you link verbs and nouns to the previous phrase.
After reciting everything so far, you add a new sentence, so the passage gradually gets longer—and the fun lies in how a story emerges from that.
You can also turn it into a game by focusing on accurately remembering and reciting the ever-growing passage and seeing how far you can keep it going.
Group Challenge! A Collection of Word Games for Adults (11–20)
absurd dialogue
A nonsensical Q&A game where you keep a conversation going by giving answers that are completely unrelated to the question.
For example, if someone asks, “What did you have for breakfast?” and you answer, “I did laundry because the weather was nice today,” that’s acceptable.
But if someone asks, “What time is it?” and you answer, “I don’t have a watch,” that’s not allowed.
In other words, taking longer to think makes it easier to give a ‘safe’ response, so you need quick wits to keep the conversation moving without answering reflexively.
Since the questioner basically can’t lose, it might be more fun as a game if you set a rule like ‘the responder wins if they can deflect a certain number of times.’
Who am I? game
It’s a game where one participant pretends to be something, answers questions that are thrown at them, and the others try to figure out what the theme item is.
The key is how you ask questions: by making your questions more specific, you can enjoy the feeling of gradually getting closer to the answer.
The difficulty can be adjusted depending on whether you prepare the target item in advance or think of it on the spot.
If you have everyone arrive at the answer and then reveal their answers all at once at the end, it should boost the energy in the room.
It might also help if someone who has figured out the answer thinks of questions that will lead others to it, so everyone can have fun.
Ogiri (Japanese improv-style comedy wordplay game)
It’s a game where players compete to see how funny an answer they can come up with based on a given prompt.
It’s a staple on TV shows, too, so it’s easy for people to picture the format.
In comedy segments, you sometimes see answers written on flip boards or drawings used to compete.
If you focus on making it casual and stick to just words, it’s important to be mindful of clarity in delivery and ease of listening—those are key to getting laughs.
Running it with a format where the host adds points whenever they think an answer is excellent, or one where you pick the best answer from those given within a time limit, makes it easy to understand who wins.
Earphone Loud Telephone Game
This is a modified, more challenging version of the classic telephone game, where a message is passed along to the next person with the goal of delivering it accurately to the last person.
In this version, the game proceeds while listening to loud music, creating a situation where speech is harder to hear.
It becomes crucial to show an attitude of trying to catch even a bit of what the previous person said and to concentrate on the sounds.
Since it’s basically a situation where you can’t hear words clearly, players will likely try to guess the words from lip movements and reconstruct them into a coherent sentence.
The more participants there are, the harder it becomes to reach the correct answer, and the process of how the words get distorted along the way becomes part of the fun.